WARD'S BOOK OF EPONYMS Who gave their names to what If you have ever wondered who gave their names to things and places, you will find the answer here. You can read about John Sandwich, George Dallas, Gustave Eiffel, James of York (New York), Clarence Birds-Eye, Charles Baltimore and many many others.

This is Ward's Book of Eponyms where you will find a large list of people who had things named after them. This page is devoted to things named after people whose name begins with the letter: S

sadism A sadist is one who takes sexual gratification with the infliction of pain on others. The word is derived from a French nobleman, Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740–1814). The Marquis joined the military as was expected of a person of his rank but resigned his commission in order to pursue a life of sexual gratification. He had affairs with several women, many of them prostitutes, enjoying a form of sexual perversion in abusing and torturing his partner. He was often arrested and imprisoned, but once released, he would continue his perverted acts. In 1772, he was sentenced to death but escaped abroad. In 1775, he returned to France and was imprisoned in the Bastille but escaped the guillotine during the Revolution. While in the Bastille, de Sade wrote in novel form and in diaries about his sexual life. He also wrote that when he died, his grave should be planted over with acorns so that his tomb would disappear and his name forgotten. However, his name lives on in the eccentricity named after him. St. Bernard For centuries, people have tried to cross the Alps through passes over 8,000 feet high. Many did not make it and froze to death, their bodies covered with snow, never to be found. In 982 A.D., a French nobleman who had renounced his wealth and titles to become a monk built shelters for pilgrims to Rome on what later came to be known as the St. Bernard Pass. This monk was canonized in 1691, and is now known as St. Bernard de Menthon (923–1008). After St. Bernard died, the other monks bred the famous St. Bernard dog. It is a cross between the Molossus hound, from Asia, and a Newfoundland breed. St. Vitus dance Saint Vitus was a child martyr of the third century who died under the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian. He was particularly venerated in Germany, where it became customary to dance round his statue in order to prevent disease. When the English physician, Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689), isolated a neurological disease, he named ‘Sydenham's chorea’, the chorea being Greek for dance, as the disease induced a nervous dancing movement. But in popular speech, the affliction became known as St. Vitus dance in honour of the saint that one dances to. salmonella This form of food poisoning, occasionally fatal, comes from foodstuffs contaminated by a bacterial genus, Salmonella. Many outbreaks of Salmonella resulted from frozen poultry that was not properly defrosted. Animals, as well as people, are subject to this infection as was discovered by Dr. Daniel Elmer Salmon (1850–1914), who identified the Salmonella genus and gave his name to it. Sam Browne belt A Sam Browne belt is used for carrying a sword or pistol. The inventor was General Sir Samuel James Browne (1824–1901), a British army officer who had a distinguished career serving in India. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his part in crushing The Indian Mutiny. Regrettably he lost an arm in service and became unable to don the belt he invented. General Sir Samuel Browne V.C. sandwich John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792), was a lover of the card table, where he used to play with his cronies for hours on end. He was so fascinated by this pursuit that he was loathe to leave the gaming table even for meals. So he ordered his servants to bring him two pieces of bread with a filling of meat, so that he could eat at the table without interrupting the game. Now restaurants and teashops around the world serve the comestible immortalized by the noble lord. The Earldom of Sandwich was named after the Town of Sandwich in Kent, England, one of the Cinque Ports. Sandwich held several political offices in his career including First Lord of the Admiralty. While he was in this office, Captain James Cook discovered a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean and named them the Sandwich Islands after his Lordship. These islands are now known as the Hawaiian Islands.   John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, inventor of the sandwich. saxophone Adolphe Sax (1814–1894), was born in Dinant, Belgium, the son of a cabinetmaker and instrument maker. He survived childhood despite being hit on the head by a brick, swallowing a needle, swallowing sulphuric acid, falling down stairs, and tumbling onto a burning stove. In 1844 he developed his new instrument and played it at a show in Paris. He was so nervous that he lost his place in the music and held onto one note until he could get back. The audience were delighted with the long sound and the instrument became popular in Parisian music circles. Sax patented the saxophone in 1846. sequoia A sequoia is a giant conifer, one of whose varieties is the redwood tree. They are the tallest living things on earth. The name comes from a member of the Cherokee tribe who devised the Cherokee alphabet. Sequoia was the son of a white trader, Nathaniel Gist, and a Cherokee woman. His name in the Cherokee language means ‘guessed’, sounds like ‘Gist’. After a hunting accident left him disabled, Sequoia decided to devise a method of writing the Cherokee language. He devised a set of symbols representing the eighty-six sounds in the language and taught his alphabet to other members of the tribe, thereby giving them their first written language. Sequoia died about 1843. In 1847, the Hungarian botanist, Stephen Endllicher, named the giant conifer after him. shrapnel General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842) tried to find new ways to win battles. European armies tended to line up in squares for battle formation, so Shrapnel reckoned that if you could land a weapon in the middle of the square, discharging in all directions, you could cause a lot of damage to the enemy lines. He invented a hollow projectile, called a shell, filled with lead balls and a charge of explosive. This was used with great effect in Surinam to capture the Dutch possessions in Guiana in 1804. The Duke of Wellington used it in against Napoleon and it tipped the balance in Britain’s favour at Waterloo. General Henry Shrapnel silhouette Etienne de Silhouette (1709–1767), became French controller of finance under Louis XV in the mid-eighteenth century through the influence of Madame de Pompadour. Silhouette instituted reforms to boost the ailing economy. He negotiated a large loan and cut public spending. He slashed state pensions and reduced the lavish program of the king’s court. He imposed a land tax on the estate of the nobles and the church, and taxed luxury items. His niggardly economic policies reminded people of shadow cut-outs, the cheapest form of art, which they identified with his miserly policies. After less than a year in office, he was obliged to resign and he retired to his château at Bry-sur-Marne where he died in 1767. He is buried in the church at Bry-sur-Marne. Simony is the sin of buying or selling ecclesiastical artefacts or preferences. It devolves from Simon Magus, a Samaritan witch, who offered money to Peter and John hoping to buy the power of the Holy Ghost. In the Bible (Acts 8:9–24), the apostles curse him with the words “May your money perish with you!" In The Apocryphal Acts of Peter, Simon performs magic in the Forum and flies up into the air. The apostle Peter prays to God to stop his flying, and he falls down into the Sacra Via and dies. siren The noisy device called a siren used by emergency vehicles was invented by a French physicist Charles Cagniard de la Tour (1777–1859), who also invented a blowing machine. He called his noise machine the ‘siren’ after the Sirens in Greek mythology, who were half woman and half bird living on an island off southern Italy. They lured mariners to destruction on the rocks by the sweetness of their singing. smart alec Very little is known about the tiresome individual who became the first ‘smart alec’, whose name was Alexander Ross (c. 1590–1654). He was a clergyman and writer from Aberdeen who spent much of his career within the Church of England. He became a figure of ridicule for his nit-picking pedantry, his bombast, his combustibility and his verbosity. One of his works was a treatise proposing that garlic hinders magnetism. His chief claim to fame is that he wrote the first English translation of Koran. Alexander Ross the first ‘smart alec’ Smith's Potato Crisps The crisp (American potato chip) was invented in 1853, by Native American chef, George Crum, of Saratoga Springs, New York. He tried to annoy a complaining customer by slicing potatoes particularly thinly and cooking them until shrivelled and so accidently invented a new delicacy. Frank Smith of Cricklewood, London, took up Crum’s idea for a new business in 1920. While his wife, cut and fried the potatoes, Smith packed the crisps and sold them in London pubs. At first, he found some customers complained about lack of flavour, so he provided saltcellars in the pubs and then sales began to take off. Unfortunately, many of his saltcellars went missing, so he invented a small blue sachet of salt, provided within the packet, thus inventing ‘Salt 'n' Shake’. Smith's Crisps are now owned by PepsiCo, who have downplayed the brand in favour of their other product Walkers Crisps. Smith's Crisps once cost 2d a packet. Smithsonian Institution James Smithson (1765–1829) was the illegitimate son of Hugh Smithson Percy, First Duke of Northumberland and Elizabeth Macie, a descendant of Henry VII. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and published 27 papers including topics on the chemical constituents of teardrops, the crystalline form of ice and the exact technique for making coffee. Carbonate of zinc is now called smithsonite in his honour. He left his wealth to the United States ‘to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institute, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.’ Smithson wanted to create an institution that would outlive the honours of the Northumberlands whose title he could not inherit due to his illegitimate birth. In 1838, Smithson’s fortune was converted to cash. It realised £100,000 in gold sovereigns, which was despatched to Philadelphia in 11 bullion boxes, to be minted into dollar coinage. These funds created the Smithsonian Institute. In 1904, Smithson’s body was taken under escort, by Alexander Graham Bell, regent of the Smithsonian, to be buried in the Smithsonian building.   The tomb of James Smithson in the crypt of the Smithsonian Institution. solecism A grammatical mistake or any departure from correct form in English is termed a solecism. The ancient Greek city of Soloi in Cilicia, modern Turkey, was far removed from the Greek native soil, so colonials developed their own dialect. Visitors from mainland Greece despised this corruption of their mother tongue and called this dialect ‘soloikos’, which in Latin became ‘soloecismus’ and in English turned into solecism. Spartan Sparta was a city-state in Ancient Greece. The people were governed by military idealism. Feeble infants were left to die of exposure, military training began at age seven and life was tough under a code of laws that stressed hardiness and loyalty to the state. The city lay in an open plain with no natural barriers for protection. A visitor from Athens once asked a Spartan general why Sparta had no walls around it. “But we do have walls,” he replied, pointing to his soldiers, “There are the walls of Sparta, and every man is a brick.” Spear and Jackson The firm was founded in 1774 by John Love in Castle St. Sheffield to supply steel saws to local sawmills. In 1784, John Spear was taken on as a partner and the firm became known as Love and Spear. In 1814, Samuel Jackson was taken on as an apprentice to John Spear and in 1830 he became a partner, when the firm changed its name to Spear & Jackson. Spear died in 1851 and Jackson took his brother, Robert, as a partner. In 1985, the business was acquired by Neill Tools Ltd. Spoonerism The Reverend William Augustus Spooner (1844–1930) was the Dean of New College, Oxford. He was known for his habit of inadvertently transposing the initial letters of two adjacent words to form a comical mispronunciation known as a spoonerism. He once offered a toast to the ‘queer old dean’ [dear old queen] and invited everyone to [fling the hags out [hang the flags out]. He said to a lethargic undergraduate. “You have tasted a whole worm. You hiss my mystery lectures. You were seen fighting a liar in the quad. You must leave on the next town drain.” Spoonerisms are still with us. Brian Clough once referred to pitch invaders as ‘cupid stunts’ and Jasper Carrot said that his aunt referred to him as ‘a shining wit’. stetson The inventor of this very Western hat was an Eastener, John Batterson Stetson (1830–1906) from New Jersey, who took a vacation in the West for his health. He noticed that the cowboys’ headgear did not afford proper protection from the sun. Returning home, he started a hat-making factory and soon became the largest manufacturer of hats in the world, specialising in the ‘ten-gallon hat.’ Stetson made enough money to found a college, Stetson University, De Land, Florida. The students at Stetson are known as ‘The Hatters’. syringe In Greek mythology, Syrinx was a virgin nymph a devotee of Artemis. She was pursued by the god Pan and ran to the river's edge where she was transformed into hollow water reeds. The reeds made a sound when Pan’s frustrated breath blew across them, which gave him the idea to fashion a set of pan-pipes. The word syringe derives from the Greek word, syrinx, for reed or hollow tube.

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