About Scotland

Heritage

Scottish Inventions

The tradition of universal access to higher education - the democratic intellectualism, the early advances in industrialisation and engineering, and the intellectual ferment of the Scottish enlightenment, all of these led to Scotland producing an inordinate amount of inventions and discoveries which shaped our modern world.

Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, John Logie Baird and television, James Watt and the steam engine, Kirkpatrick Fleming and the bicycle…Dunlop with the pneumatic tyre…McIntosh with the classic mac, the raincoat. These are the best known…but in medicine we have James Young Simpson and chloroform, Alexander Fleming and penicillin, Sir James Black and his beta blockers so crucial in the treatment of heart disease.

Today the tradition continues - Dolly the Sheep was first cloned in Scotland, while ground breaking cancer research is going on at the University of Dundee.