How Scotsmen influenced the world

Is there a nation on earth whose sons have contributed more to a modern world than Scotland?

I ask this after a two week road trip clockwise from Edinburgh to the Isle of Skye to Dornoch to Aberdeen to St Andrews and finally to Glasgow. Along the way we’ve had tourist experiences, done guided tours and indulged in a little follow-up reading.

What you discover is that for a country with a still-modest population, the influence of Scotsmen on the world has been astounding.

The men who invented two of the most significant technologies of the 20th century — the telephone and the television — were Scottish.

Medicine has never looked back since the discovery of penicillin — by a Scotsman.

The man who improved the steam engine so much, it led directly to the Industrial Revolution was Scottish.

Then there was the expansion of the American steel industry spearheaded by another Scottish-born entrepreneur.

Not to mention the philosopher who concluded that all human knowledge derives from empirical evidence and that religious miracles did not actually happen.

Or “The Father of Economics” who developed the concepts of reason, civil liberties and free speech.

That’s not a bad all-star roll call for the history of modern man. More on the individuals soon.

But first a disclaimer. A saliva DNA test revealed that I am 91 percent Scottish. I could have correctly guessed this because my paternal grandmother’s ancestors were on the Philip Laing when it sailed into Port Chalmers from Glasgow in 1848. My mother’s grandparents arrived in South Canterbury from near Dundee in the early 1920s.

So the bagpipes, the kilt, haggis and whiskey should course through very Scottish veins, yet in my 70 years on this planet I’ve never felt an especially close bond to the land of my forebears despite visiting numerous times in the last 40 years.

That’s because first and foremost I’m proud to be a New Zealander.

Both sides of my family ancestors come from modest and uneducated backgrounds in Scotland.  They were mostly rural and some were possibly victims of the Clearances, that appalling time in Scottish history (1750-1860) when the landowning gentry removed their small-holding tenant farmers because there was more money to be made from larger scale pastoral grazing.

However, many of the great inventors, scientists, writers and thinkers referred to above appear to have been products of Scotland’s educated urban middle and upper classes of their time.

Like Adam Smith. His father, who died two months before the future philosopher and economist was born in 1723, was a solicitor and prosecutor in Kirkcaldy. His mother came from a land owning family. Smith — who started at the University of Glasgow at age 14 — developed thinking on free markets and competition which led to his book The Wealth of Nations, a contrast to the high tariff regime of mercantilism which dominated the known world of the 18th Century. Smith’s ideas are the basis of laissez-faire economic thinking to this day, ideas which have led to some of the most prosperous societies in history.

Smith was a slightly younger contemporary of David Hume, also from Scottish noble stock, although of a line that was not wealthy. Hume’s contribution to the so-called Enlightenment era was to say that human knowledge is formed from experience and empirical evidence. Hume rejected the idea of religious miracles and the actual existence of a God. These were outrageous ideas for their time and Hume was nearly put on trial for heresy. But his ideas, expressed in the book A Treatise of Human Nature, remain influential nearly 250 years after his death.

James Watt, the son of a shipwright and ship owner from Greenock on the Firth of Clyde, did not actually invent the steam engine but he improved the efficiency of the original Newcomen design so much that by 1776 what became known as the Industrial Revolution started. The application of steam power to machines that could manufacture fabric and tools and process food changed the world. Watt lived much of his adult life in England and became the second Scotsman, after Adam Smith, to appear on a Bank of England banknote. His everlasting legacy is his name in our units of power.

Andrew Carnegie has been described as the greatest Scotsman of all because of his extraordinary generosity. He left the country of his birth at the age of 12 after his father, a handloom weaver, had fallen on tough times during the Industrial Revolution. The Carnegie family from Dunfermline used borrowed money to emigrate to western Pennsylvania. Young Andrew never returned to school, working in a cotton mill, for a telegraph company, and then the Pennsylvania Railroad. He later invested in the fledgling steel industry and grew it so much he sold the Carnegie Steel Company to J. P. Morgan for more than $300 million in 1901. He then proceeded to give most of his fortune away to fund libraries, universities and research institutions. When Carnegie died in 1919 the remaining $30 million of his wealth was also given away to charity.

The inventor of the telephone was another emigrant to North America, although at a later age. Alexander Graham Bell, born, raised and educated in Edinburgh went to Canada with his family at the age of 23. As his mother and wife were both deaf, he experimented with hearing devices which led to the invention of the telephone, for which he was granted a US patent in 1876. Ironically he refused to have a phone in his study, even after founding the American Telephone and Telegraph company (AT&T) in 1885. Like James Watt, Bell’s name lives on in the unit to measure sound, the decibel. In 1936, the US Patent Office declared him America’s greatest inventor. 

If the telephone changed the way the world communicated at an individual level, then think of the impact television had as a means of mass communication. Another Scotsman, John Logie Baird had shifted to the south coast of England as a 23-year-old to try and improve his health. An engineer by training, although not a university graduate, his experiments in the city of Hastings, Sussex led to him being able to transmit moving silhouette pictures through radio waves. He first demonstrated the images publicly in March of 1925. The centenary next year should be marked as the anniversary of one of the most significant days in the history of modern civilisation. Baird died in Sussex just after World War 2 at the age of 57.

The increase in global life expectancy has been assisted in no small measure by the development of medicines, one of the most significant being penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic killer of disease. It was invented by Alexander Fleming, born on the west coast of Scotland and who went to London in his later teenage years. After working for a shipping company for a time, Fleming didn’t enter medical school in London till he was 22 years old. After service as a doctor in World War 1, for which he was Mentioned in Dispatches, Fleming began his research in bacteriology. In September 1928 he returned from holiday to notice that a staphylococci culture he’d left in his laboratory had been infected with a fungus and that the staphylococci surrounding the fungus had been destroyed. He famously remarked “that’s funny”, but it was the breakthrough against infection the world had been trying to discover. Fleming ensured the subsequent medicine would be readily available to improve public health and was furious when two Americans patented it in 1944. As he said, “I found penicillin and gave it free for the benefit of humanity.”  Fleming, who never returned to live in Scotland, died in London in 1955.

That’s a brief summary of those responsible for some of the world’s greatest inventions and of modern day thinking. That they all originated in one small and underpopulated nation is remarkable and unrivalled by any other country.

And I haven’t mentioned the country’s contribution to the arts and literature. Sir Walter Scott, Robbie Burns, Arthur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie or Robert Louis Stevenson anyone?

(Not J. K. Rowling though. She’s English, and just happened to write the first Harry Potter book in a café near Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.)

So many New Zealanders are descendants of Scottish settlers. If you, like me, are one of them, take pride in what some of our ancestors achieved. Be inspired by the influence they had on the world.

It’s unlikely any country anywhere will ever produce so many important thinkers and makers over a two hundred year period ever again.

For more from Peter, listen to Pete's Ponderings on RCR.