Escapism or disengagement? - We can’t sing Abba songs all of the time

The Scot Alexander Graham Bell, the great-grandfather of Facebook and Snapchat, is remembered in the term used to measure volume — decibel.

The American seismologist Charles F Richter is invoked every time an earthquake strikes. He designed the metric to record an earthquake’s severity. Francis Beaufort, born in Navan in 1774, established a convention for measuring wind speed still in use.