Страница 82 из 87
Chapter 19
Ten Things Scotland Has Given to the World
In This Chapter
Looking at advances in science, technology and medicine
Considering religion and sport
Focusing on the all-important whisky
For a small country, Scotland has had its share of ground-breaking inventions, covering all areas of human life. Okay, so the Scots didn’t invent the wheel, but they invented or discovered pretty much everything else! Penicillin, the telephone, the steam engine, paved roads and television all originated here. In this chapter, I cover just a few of the many things that you may or may not have realised were invented in Scotland.
The Flushing Toilet
Archaeologists at Skara Brae on Orkney have discovered evidence that Neolithic man used a system of hydraulic technology involving a nearby river and drainage cha
The King James Bible
The King James Bible of 1611 has been described as the most important book in English culture and religion. Although there had been translations of the Bible and parts of the Bible into English dating back to the 15th century, none was as ambitious in scale or coverage as the King James Bible. Its birth was due to King James VI of Scotland, who, since 1601, had expressed a desire to have the Bible translated into everyday English.
When James became king of England and Scotland two years later, one of his first acts was to commission a new translation of the Bible into English, one that he insisted would adhere to the character of the Church of England. The translation was carried out by 47 scholars working in Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster. Their work was finished in 1611, and the new printed bible sold at 10 shillings loose-leaf or 12 shillings bound. The translation wasn’t plain sailing, and it took time to be accepted, but it eventually became the authorised version used by Protestants all over the world.
The importance of the King James Bible is not just spiritual – it’s also literary. It has contributed more sayings to the English language than any other single source, including Shakespeare. Examples include ‘feet of clay’ and ‘reap the whirlwind’.
Criminal Fingerprinting
We’ve all seen countless examples in TV shows and movies when the criminal leaves a fingerprint at the scene of the crime and because of this gets convicted. Each fingerprint is unique – the chances of two different people having the same fingerprint are thought to be 1 in 64 billion!
The uniqueness of the fingerprint has been long recognised. It was used in India by Sir James Herschel in 1877 to prevent the relatives of deceased government pensioners from fraudulently collecting their pensions after their death. However, it was a Scottish surgeon and medical missionary, Henry Faulds, working in a Tokyo hospital, who in 1880 first proposed using printing ink to record them. He also worked out a system for fingerprint classification.
Faulds returned to Britain in 1886 and immediately offered his invention to Scotland Yard, but the police authorities dismissed it. Undaunted, he approached Charles Darwin, but because Darwin was getting on a bit and not in the best of health, he passed Faulds’s letter to his half-cousin, Francis Galton. Unscrupulously, Galton used Faulds’s invention and methods without attribution in his book
Finger Prints.
But there is no doubt that Faulds published the first paper on the subject in the scientific journal
Nature
in 1880. So, the honour of having been the inventor of criminal fingerprinting goes to him.
Unfortunately, Faulds resented the lack of recognition he received for his work during his life. He died in March 1930 at the age of 86, a very embittered man.
Whisky: Water of Life
Although Scotch whisky is enjoyed in more than 200 countries today and is a multi-billion-pound export industry, it was not the drink of choice of Scots until the 17th century. Before then, Scots drank wine and porter, a kind of ale. The first record of whisky distillation was in 1494 by Friar John Cor of Lindores, Fife. Because it was cheap to produce and didn’t need much scientific knowledge (practically anybody could do it), the production of whisky soon grew.
The Scottish government – never short of new methods of raising taxes – introduced the first duty on whisky in 1644. This led to widespread evasion, and the number of illegal whisky stills multiplied. By 1780, there were reckoned to be 8 legal distilleries and 400 illegal ones!
Many bloody encounters occurred between the
excisemen
(government officials empowered to shut down illegal stills) and whisky smugglers. The former weren’t too successful – about half of all the whisky distilled in Scotland never resulted in any duty being paid. However, step by step, the government drove the illegal distillers out of business, and by 1840, the industry was in the hands of the legal distilleries licensed by government order.
The invention of the column still by Aeneas Coffey in 1830 cheapened the production even more and produced a smoother-tasting spirit. In 1850, Andrew Usher introduced blended whisky, which combined grain (made from wheat, rye and so on) with malt (made from malted barley). Its cheapness increased the spirit’s popularity. However, what crowned whisky as the number-one spirit of choice was the phylloxera bug, which destroyed wine and cognac production in France in 1880. So, when you raise a dram in a toast, remember that it’s the most fought-over alcoholic beverage ever produced!
Colour Photography
One thing you can say about Victorian Scots is that they were an inventive lot, and none more so than James Clerk Maxwell. Although better known for his work on electromagnetism, Maxwell presented the world’s first demonstration of colour photography to the Royal Institution in 1861. He had been interested in colour theory all his adult life and had written scientific papers on colour blindness. His research led him to the conclusion that if you took three black-and-white photographs of an object or a scene through red, green and blue filters – the primary colours seen by the eye – and projected those onto a screen using three projectors with similar filters, the eye would be deceived into thinking that it was a composite of all the colours in the scene.
For the 1861 presentation, a tartan ribbon was used and the photograph was taken by Thomas Sutton, the inventor of the single lens reflex (SLR) camera. (No, he wasn’t Scottish.) From that point onward, the three-colour method became the foundation of all colour processes, whether chemical or electronic. Say cheese, everyone!
Anaesthetic
Can you imagine what it must have been like to have surgery before the introduction of anaesthetics? Think of the agony! We have a lot to thank James Young Simpson for. Simpson, an obstetrician who was born in Bathgate, West Lothian, was responsible for the discovery of the anaesthetic properties of chloroform. He discovered it one evening in 1847 during an experiment with his friends, in which he learned chloroform could be used to put people to sleep. His friends didn’t wake up until the next morning! Then he tried it out on his niece, who fell asleep after inhaling it while singing. Happy first, sleepy later!
Within weeks of the publication of his ‘Account of a New Anaesthetic Agent’, chloroform had almost completely replaced ether as an anaesthetic. However, it was not universally accepted until Dr John Snow administered chloroform to Queen Victoria when she gave birth to the last two of her nine children, Leopold in 1853 and Beatrice in 1857. When Simpson died in 1870 at the age of 53, a grateful nation turned out in their thousands to bid him farewell.
Raincoats
Outside the Amazonian rainforest, there is only one part of the world where you would be in greater need of something to keep you dry – the west of Scotland! Like most inventions, the waterproof coat was the result of an accident. In 1823, as he was experimenting with rubber, Charles MacIntosh from Glasgow (where else!) created the world’s first waterproof material. He called this material ‘rubberised cloth’ and initially used it to produce waterproof versions of British riding coats. The coats had two qualities never before experienced: dryness and comfort.
There were early teething problems co
Golf
You may think of golf as a good walk spoiled, but it’s clearly one of the most popular sports in the world. There is some debate about its origins: the Dutch claim to have invented it, and so do the French. However, while there was something like golf played with ball and stick in these places, there was one thing missing: the hole. The object of the game as it evolved in Scotland was to get the ball in the hole! That simple task has broken a million hearts, destroyed countless marriages and led to many a nervous breakdown.
The game seems to have started in Scotland in the late medieval period. The earliest reference to it was in 1502, when James IV, who had previously ba
It was still a far cry from the game we know today with its many rules and regulations. However, golf was evolving: on 7 March 1744, the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith produced the first set of written rules; stroke play was introduced in 1759; and the 18-hole course made its appearance in 1764. Over the years, new i
Although professionals began to emerge later in the 19th century, in Scotland it was still the people’s game. Unlike in England, where golf was snobby and revolved round the clubhouse, it was the course that counted in Scotland. Many of Scotland’s most famous courses – like the Old Course of St Andrews – are still owned by local councils. Today, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews is the governing body of world golf, responsible for legislation on the rules – but don’t ask them to allow women members!
Dolly the Sheep