The Inventive Minds of Scotland

Scotland, a small country with some great inventors and very friendly people with Inventive Minds.

In 1944, I joined the U.S. Navy as a Morse code radio operator. On a large Liberty ship, we sailed to Europe and landed in Scotland where we stayed for several days before traveling on to Utah Beach in France to start the real battle against the German military. It took several months to unload the large amount of ammunition and the 125 vehicles that we brought with us.

I found Scotland to be a wonderful place with bright and friendly people. Recently I thought of showing our readers a bit about what inventors did there for years.

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Sir James Swinburne was an electrical engineer and an inventor. He received many patents for his ideas and inventions. When he applied for a patent for Bakelite, he was one day too late because Mr. Baekeland presented his idea for a patent the day before Swinburne did.

Buick is the brand name of many millions of cars in the United States. The cars were named after a Scot who immigrated to the United States in 1856, Dunbar Buick. He started as a plumber at age 15 and as a youngster he developed a method of bonding enamel to cast iron. His passion was the internal combustion engine.

In 1899 he lived in Detroit and formed the Buick Auto-Van and Power Company, which manufactured internal combustion engines. He also patented a carburetor, but business debts and failed investments prevented him from realizing profits from his inventions. He died in 1929 as an impoverished man. Then, eight years later, General Motors saluted his inventiveness and in 1937 they used his name, Buick, for its new line of cars.

Lord Kelvin was a professor at Glasgow University and he was a pioneer in the field of thermodynamics. He did so much work with temperatures that the Kelvin Scale of Temperature was named in his honor.

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This is an interesting story: A Dundee Scottish business man imported a shipload of oranges from Spain, where they grew well. However, he found they were too bitter to sell as a fruit and he wondered what to do about it. What he did was to turn them into an orange preserve, and there was the great creation of the popular marmalade.

Sir Alexander Fleming is a well-known Scottish name. As a bacteriologist, he discovered penicillin in 1928 and it has been used very often to save lives. It is claimed that there have been more lives saved by penicillin than the number of people who were lost and died in all the wars of history.

James Watt was instrumental in powering the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. He is the inventor of the steam engine. Originally it was not moving but remained fixed in a position. At that time, it was built to be used in mining to pull coal carts up to the top. The mine manager, John Blenkinsop, decided to put one of these steam boilers on wheels so that it could carry coal much farther. Then along came George Stephenson, another mining engineer, who used James Watt’s engine to invent the steam locomotive. People have been riding in them since.

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical student in Edinburgh. He became a writer and author of wonderful tales, including those about Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was based upon one of the professors of medicine that Doyle liked at the university. What was important was that Doyle learned the techniques of deduction and forensic science from his professor. A recent BBC program, “The Killing Rooms,� showed how Doyle learned the techniques. Sherlock Holmes stories are among the best mysteries written to this day.

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde� is a famous novel about a mad doctor and his alter-ego, written by Robert Louis Stevenson, in Edinburgh. Interestingly, Stevenson claimed that each chapter was the result of his dreaming and thinking about installments every night. What a way to write a story!

Poet Robert “Rabbie� Burns wrote a song that has become one of the most sung in the world, “Auld Lang Syne.� It is now often associated with New Year celebrations. Interestingly, the song “Happy Birthday� sometimes competes with “Auld Lang Syne.� The Scots were “inventors� in many fields.

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These are just a small number of the creations by the Scotch dreamers and thinkers and they are among the most remembered. I continue to enjoy thinking about this small country and its wonderful creators with their Inventive Minds. It caused me to visit Scotland a number of times when I roamed around and talked with the Scots.

Sidney X. Shore is a scientist, inventor and educator who lives in Sharon and holds more than 30 U.S. patents.