The first Head of Astronomy was Hermann Brück, who established a program of solar near-UV spectroscopy and photo-electric stellar photometry. Geophysics was headed by Leo Wenzel Pollak who worked mainly on atmospheric aerosol physics in close collaboration with the Nolan brothers in UCD. Attempts were made to persuade the Austrian Nobel laureate Victor Francis Hess to come to Dublin as first head of the Cosmic Ray section, but in the end, he declined and the position was offered to a Hungarian physicist, Lajos Janossy, who came from Patrick Blackett’s laboratory in Manchester and worked on what would now be called air shower physics.