George Francis FitzGerald (3 August 1851 – 21 February 1901) was an Irish theoretical physicist known for length contraction, which became an integral part of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.

[1] Professor of Moral Philosophy in Trinity and vicar of St Anne's, Dawson Street, at the time of his son's birth, William FitzGerald was consecrated Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross in 1857 and translated to Killaloe and Clonfert in 1862.

He became a Fellow of Trinity in 1877 and spent the rest of his career there, becoming Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy in 1881.

[4] In 1883, following from Maxwell's equations, FitzGerald was the first to suggest a device for producing rapidly oscillating electric currents to generate electromagnetic waves, a phenomenon which was first shown to exist experimentally by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz in 1888.

FitzGerald married, on 21 December 1885, Harriette Mary, daughter of the Reverend John Hewitt Jellett, Provost of TCD and Dorothea Morris Morgan.

[8] FitzGerald was the nephew of George Johnstone Stoney, the Irish physicist who coined the term "electron".

[citation needed] FitzGerald, in common with others at the end of the nineteenth century, became obsessed with the desire to fly.

The flying machine hung for many years in the Museum Building until an idle engineering student applied a match to the cord from which it was hanging.