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10 GREAT SCOTS
David Livingstone (1813 - 1873)
Alexander III (1241 - 1286)
William Ewart Gladstone (1809 - 1898)
Alexander Graham Bell (1847 - 1922)
John Logie Baird (1888 - 1946)
Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (1861 - 1928)
James Watt (1736 - 1819)
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542 - 1587)
James Keir Hardie (1856 - 1915)
Sir Alexander Fleming (1881 - 1955)
Alexander III (1241 - 1286)
He succeeded his father, Alexander II, during an
age of relative peace
and prosperity in Scotland. In 1251 he married the eldest daughter of
Henry III of England, Princess Margaret.Significantly, he annexed the Western Isles through the Treaty of Perth in 1266 after the defeat of King Haakon IV of Norway at Largs, thus confirming the emergence of Scotland as a European kingdom of some rank. Despite the death of his queen in 1275, his reign is often described as a golden age for the Scots. The loss of a son, then a daughter, leaving a last daughter, prompted a second marriage (1285) in a bid to beget a male heir, but Alexander died (1286) without issue en route to being reunited with his new wife. The succession was disputed and England returned to interfering in Scottish affairs once again.
David Livingstone (1813 - 1873)
One of seven children, Livingstone was raised in
poverty. At the age of
ten he began work in the local cotton mill, studying the classics in
his spare time. He decided he wanted to become a missionary and, in
1840, was ordained. He arrived in South Africa the following year.He immediately began travelling inland, looking for converts and seeking to end the slave trade, his life's missions. By 1842, he had already gone further north into Kalahari country than any other white man and, in 1853, set out to find a route to the Atlantic coast. After reaching Luanda on the coast in May 1854 and returning to Linyanti, he explored the Zambezi region, arriving to the waterfalls that he renamed Victoria Falls.
Back in his native land, and a national hero, Livingstone recounted his travels in his best-selling Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857). From 1858 to 1864 he was in Africa on a second expedition, this time to explore eastern and central Africa. However, disillusionment with his leadership set in amongst members of the expedition, navigating the Zambezi proved impossible and, to cap it all, his wife died in April 1862.
Livingstone returned to Africa in 1864 to look for the ultimate sources of the Nile. Striking out from Mikindani on the east coast, the expedition was forced south and some of his followers deserted him, concocting the story that he had been killed and making headline news. Livingstone, however, pressed on, discovering Lakes Mweru and Bangweulu. He reached Lake Tanganyika in February 1869 and, despite illness, carried on. In March 1871, he arrived at Nyangwe, on the Lualaba leading into the Congo River. This was further west than any European had penetrated before.
Returning to the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, Livingstone's health was deteriorating fast. The arrival of Henry Stanley, a correspondent of the New York Herald who had been sent to search for the explorer, provided him with much needed food and medicine. He joined Stanley's exploration of the northern reaches of Lake Tanganyika and then accompanied him to Unyanyembe, where they parted ways. Livingstone moved south again, obsessed by his quest for the Nile sources, but died in May 1873. His body is buried in Westminster Abbey
William Ewart Gladstone (1809 - 1898)
William Ewart Gladstone, four-time prime
minister of Great Britain,
Gladstone remained a vigorous campaigner until his death.Having been persuaded against a career in the Church, Gladstone was elected to Parliament in 1832, as a Tory. He made his mark from the start and held minor office in Peel's government of 1834-35. In July 1839 he married Catherine. The two maintained a 'rescue' home for prostitutes and Gladstone would, famously, trawl London streets at night, trying to persuade prostitutes to start a new life.
Although he was slowly moving towards liberalism, in 1843 he entered Peel's Conservative cabinet. However, in 1852 he joined Aberdeen's Whig government as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position he would ultimately hold three times. His efforts to extend the franchise failed and ended the government in 1866. Two years later, the Liberals were back, with Gladstone in charge. Queen Victoria, who disliked him personally, was forced to ask him to become prime minister.
Gladstone began to tackle Ireland's oppressive landlordism and disestablished the Irish Protestant church in 1869. Abroad, he failed to promote disarmament and was caught out by the start of the Franco-German War. A heavy defeat in 1874 led to his retirement.
It was short-lived. Turkish brutality in the Balkans brought Gladstone back to active politics in 1875. His campaign to remove Turkish forces was widely opposed, but a magnificent campaign secured his return to Parliament and a Liberal government in 1880.
For over two years, Gladstone was both prime minister and chancellor. His failure to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum cost him dearly, his popularity only partially recovered by his firm handling of a dispute with Russia. He resigned in 1885 after a budget defeat.
Gladstone formed his third government in 1886, but his Irish Home Rule Bill was rejected by both Parliament and the electorate. He devoted the next six years to convincing the British electorate to grant Home Rule. Campaigning on the issue, the Liberals won the 1892 election. Gladstone was back.
Another Home Rule Bill was rejected by the Lords in 1893. He found himself increasingly at odds with his cabinet and, in 1894, he retired. Humanitarian to the end, in his last major speech he denounced Turkish atrocities in Armenia. He died of cancer in 1898 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Alexander Graham Bell (1847 - 1922)
Alexander Graham Bell Bell was born into a
family specialising in
elocution: both his father and his grandfather were authorities on the
subject, and before long he himself was teaching people how to speak.
Largely family trained and self-taught, in 1863, at the age of 16, he
and his brother Melville began researching the mechanics of speech.
Starting with the anatomy of the mouth and throat, they sacrificed the
family cat in order to study the vocal chords in more detail.In 1864 Bell became a resident master in Elgin's Weston House Academy in Scotland, where he conducted his first studies in sound and first conceived the idea of transmitting speech with electricity. His idea was to make a device that could mimic the human voice and reproduce vowels and consonants. His father had already spent years classifying vocal sounds and had developed a shorthand system called Visible Speech, in which every sound was represented by a symbol, with the intention of teaching the deaf to speak by putting these sounds together.
The onset of tuberculosis, which killed his two brothers, prompted a family move to Canada in 1870 so that he could recuperate. After spending some time in Boston, lecturing and demonstrating the Visible Speech system, he chose to settle there in 1872. He opened his own school to train teachers for the deaf, edited his pamphlet Visible Speech Pioneer, and continued to study and teach, becoming professor of vocal physiology at Boston University in 1873. The idea of transmitting speech along a wire never left him, and after considerable research and many false dawns, by 1875 he had come up with a simple receiver that could turn electricity into sound.
Others were also working to invent such a device, among them an Italian immigrant to America, Antonio Meucci. He was ready to patent his 'teletrofono' in 1871, but could not raise the sum necessary. The dispute continues as to who should be credited with the invention of the telephone, although in 2002 the US Congress made a statement recognising retrospectively that it was Meucci who was first with the idea - a statement that continues to provoke argument.
On 6 April 1875, however, it was Bell who was granted the patent for his multiple telegraph, and he also continued work on his telephone. The final breakthrough was an accident that occurred while testing a circuit with one transmitter and two receivers on 2 June 1875. The transmitter was switched off and Watson was adjusting one of the receivers when Bell heard a note coming from the receiver in his room. With the transmitter turned off, the note had to be coming from the other receiver. He had discovered that the receiver could also work in reverse: instead of making sound when electricity was sent through it, it also made electricity when supplied with sound because the sound moved the magnet in the coil and generates electricity. More importantly, the electricity varied with the voice.
Bell developed his system and submitted his patent on 14 February 1876, just two hours before Elisha Gray, seemingly his strongest rival. The patent was granted on 7 March, and was possibly the most valuable patent ever issued: over 600 law suits followed before a Supreme Court decision ruled in Bell's favour in 1893. Developments were swift. Within a year the first telephone exchange was built in Connecticut and within the decade more than 150,000 people in the US alone owned telephones. The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, with Bell the owner of a third of the 5,000 shares. Stock in the company soared from $50 to over $1,000 a share within three years.
Bell was not yet 30 years old. Now a resident of Washington, DC, he continued his experiments in communication, in medical research, and in techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. In 1880 France awarded him with the Volta Prize, worth approximately 50,000 francs (around $10,000), and he used the money to finance the Volta Laboratory where, in association with Charles Sumner Tainter, he invented the Graphophone. His share of the royalties from this invention financed the Volta Bureau and the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf.
His soaring stock in the Bell Telephone Company had made him a man of independent means. In 1885 he acquired land on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. In surroundings reminiscent of his early years in Scotland, he established a summer home there, complete with research laboratories. Here he continued his work with deaf people - including a young Helen Keller - and continued to invent, although lightning would not strike again. He made peculiar aircraft with wings based on triangles, he built the forerunner to the iron lung, and he experimented with sheep. He was convinced that sheep with extra nipples would give birth to more lambs, and built a huge village of sheep pens, spending years counting sheep nipples, before the US State Department announced that extra nipples were not linked with extra lambs.
In 1898 Bell succeeded his father-in-law as president of the National Geographic Society. He believed that geography could be taught through pictures, and so sought to promote a more common understanding of life in distant lands for the vast majority of people who could not afford to travel. Gilbert Grosvenor, his future son-in-law, eventually transformed a modest pamphlet into the groundbreaking National Geographic Magazine - an educational journal that today reaches millions worldwide.
John Logie Baird (1888 - 1946)
John Logie Baird Dogged by ill health for most
of his life, Baird
nonetheless showed early signs of the ingenuity that would later bring
him fame, rigging up a telephone exchange to connect his bedroom to
those of his friends across the street. His studies at Glasgow
University were interrupted in their final year by the outbreak of war
in 1914. Rejected as unfit for the forces, he served as superintendent
engineer of the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company, but when the war
ended he set himself up in business, with mixed results. He
successfully sold medicated socks, but his jam factory and soap
projects in Trinidad made little headway.Moving back to Britain in 1922, he applied himself to creating a television, a dream of many scientists for decades. His first crude apparatus sat on a washstand. The base of his motor was a tea chest, a biscuit tin housed the projection lamp, scanning discs were cut from cardboard, and he also utilised four-penny cycle lenses. Scrap-wood, darning needles, string, and sealing wax held the apparatus together.
By 1924 he managed to transmit across a few feet the flickering image of a Maltese cross and on 26th January 1926 he gave the world's first demonstration of true television in his attic workshop before some fifty scientists. In 1927 his television was demonstrated over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow, and he formed the Baird Television Development Company, Ltd. (BTDC). In 1928 the BTDC achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in mid-Atlantic. He also gave the first demonstration of both colour and stereoscopic television.
In 1929 the German Post Office gave him the facilities to develop an experimental television service based on his mechanical system, the only one operable at the time. To begin with, sound and vision had to be sent alternately, and only began to be transmitted simultaneously from 1930. However, Baird's mechanical system was rapidly becoming obsolete as electronic systems were being developed, chiefly by Marconi in America. Although he had invested in the mechanical system in order to achieve early results, Baird had also been exploring electronic systems from an early stage. Nevertheless, a BBC committee of inquiry in 1935 prompted a side-by-side trial between Marconi's all-electronic television system, which worked on 405 lines to Baird's 240. Marconi won, and in 1937 Baird's system was dropped.
Although Baird is chiefly remembered for mechanical television, his developments were not limited to this alone. In 1930 he demonstrated big-screen television in the London Coliseum, as well as Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm. He televised the first live transmission, of the Epsom Derby, in 1931, and the following year he was the first to demonstrate ultra-short wave transmission.
Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (1861 - 1928)
Douglas Haig 'Kill more Germans' summarised Haig's strategy
as
Commander in chief of the British forces in France during most of World
War One. His war of attrition resulted in enormous numbers of British
casualties and his leadership remains controversial.As a young officer, Haig fought in the Sudan, in the Boer War and held administrative posts in India. From 1906-1909 he was assigned to the War Office, where he helped form the Territorial Army and organize an expeditionary force for any future war in Europe. When war broke out in August 1914, Haig led the 1st Corps to northern France. In early 1915 he became commander of the 1st Army before succeeding Sir John French as commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force in December.
In 1916 Haig was responsible for the Battle of the Somme, which cost 420,000 British casualties over four months for minimal gain. The next year saw further stalemate: the US entered the war in April but the French command wanted to stay on the defensive until the first of the Americans arrived. This frustrated Haig, who was subordinate to the French general Robert Nivelle. From May he was given more authority and determined to defeat the Germans with a purely British offensive. The resulting Third Battle of Ypres from July to November 1917 (also called Passchendaele) saw further enormous British casualties that shocked the public back home. Passchendaele failed to reach Haig's objective - the Belgian coast - but nonetheless succeeded in weakening the Germans and helped prepare the way for their defeat in 1918.
Supported by King George V, Haig believed that the war could only be won on the Western Front. This caused friction with David Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War and Prime Minister from December 1916. Unlike Haig, he thought that the war could be accelerated by attacking from the east. However, Haig remained in his post and from March 1918 succeeded in stopping the last German offensive of the war (March-July 1918), before showing perhaps his best leadership in the victorious Allied assault from August onwards.
After the war, Haig organised the British Legion and travelled throughout the British Empire collecting money for former servicemen. He was created an earl in 1919.
James Watt (1736 - 1819)
While many believe that he invented the steam
engine, the first working
steam engine was patented years earlier in 1698, the year James Watt's
father was born. By his own birth, vast Newcomen engines were pumping
water from mines all over the country. In 1764 he was given a model
Newcomen engine to repair. It had already been repaired once, but would
still not run. Watt realised that this was because it was hopelessly
inefficient.The major problem with the Newcomen engine was that three quarters of the steam was wasted in heating the cold cylinder up to 100 degrees before the steam stopped condensing and started generating power. He spoke with his friend Joseph Black, who had been studying latent heat for some whisky distillers. Even when the water was at 100°, a great deal of extra heat was required to shake the molecules loose and turn the water into steam. That heat was half the cost of making whisky, and it was also the heat that was being wasted in the Newcomen engine. One Sunday afternoon in May 1765 Watt went for a walk on Glasgow Green. As he put it, 'I had not walked further than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind': the engine needed a separate condenser.
In 1768 Watt visited Dr Roebuck, who was backing him because he wanted a more efficient engine to pump the water out of his coalmines. It was at Roebuck's home, in great secrecy, that he built his first real engine. Although finished in September 1769, it did not work properly. The ensuing patent was extremely wide-ranging and included the separate condenser, but also a complicated rotary engine that never did work, as well as a high-pressure steam engine.
Insecure financial backing meant that further work was continuously interrupted by necessary paid professional jobs surveying canals and designing bridges. It was not until Watt worked with Matthew Boulton, a forceful and energetic Birmingham-based tycoon, that the engine worked successfully in 1775. Boulton & Watt became the most important engineering firm in the country, meeting considerable demand. Initially this came from Cornish mine-owners, but extended to paper, flour, cotton and iron mills, as well as distilleries, canals and waterworks. By 1790 Watt was a wealthy man, having received £76 000 in royalties on his patents in eleven years. In 1785 he and Boulton were elected fellows of the Royal Society.
He continued his work, eventually inventing the parallel motion. He told his son many years later, 'I am more proud of the parallel motion than of any other mechanical invention I have ever made'. However, his undisputed talent aside, he was stubborn and resistant to change. He was absolutely fixed on his engine, and refused to use high-pressure steam, where the piston is pushed by steam rather than the atmosphere. He also refused to use a crank - to translate the reciprocal motion of the steam engine into the rotary motion required by most machines - because someone else had already mentioned it in another patent. Arguably this stubbornness, along with the extension of his original patent until 1800, delayed the further development of the steam engine by some 20 years.
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542 - 1587)
Queen of Scotland from 1542-67 and queen consort
of France from
1559-60, whose complicated personal life and political immaturity
eventually led to her execution by Elizabeth I.Mary was the only child of James V of Scotland and his French wife, Mary of Guise. Her father's death, soon after her birth, left Mary as Queen of Scotland. She was sent to France and raised at the court of Henry II; in April 1558 she was married to Francis, Henry's son. That year Elizabeth I became queen of England; Mary's Tudor blood made her Elizabeth's heir. This would prove problematic for both.
Upon Henry II's death in 1559 her husband, Francis, became king, but died the next year. Widowed at the age of 18, Mary returned to Scotland in 1561. She faced many problems. A Catholic in a Protestant land, many regarded her as a foreign queen with an alien religion. Most difficult of all were the Scottish nobles, who cared more for private feuds than supporting the crown. Yet Mary started well, practising religious tolerance and papering over the cracks in Scottish politics.
The slide started with her second marriage to the Earl of Darnley, in 1565. Their relationship quickly soured and the murder in March 1566 of her secretary, David Rizzio, by Darnley and a group of nobles, convinced Mary that Darnley was after her. The birth of their son James in June did nothing to help and, now with an heir, Mary sought a conclusion.
Mary's enemies claimed that she started an affair with the Earl of Bothwell, plotting with him to kill Darnley. She was certainly considering divorce. Yet events took over. In February 1567, the house where Darnley was staying blew up; he died of strangulation. Just three months later she married Bothwell, the chief suspect. He proved no improvement on Darnley and the Scottish nobility rebelled. In June 1567, Bothwell was exiled and Mary deposed. The next year, her supporters were defeated in battle and she fled.
She sought refuge in England. Elizabeth, loaded with the political cunning Mary lacked, employed various excuses to imprison Mary for the next 18 years. Mary, desperate to be freed, first tried pleas and, later, plots. The discovery in 1586 of a plot to assassinate Elizabeth and bring about a Catholic uprising convinced Elizabeth that, while she lived, Mary would always be too dangerous. Although she was a queen herself, Mary was tried by an English court and condemned to death. She was executed in 1587, aged 44.
James Keir Hardie (1856 - 1915)
James Keir Hardie Keir Hardie's life story is
one of astonishing
achievement and undaunted commitment - a story in which he rose from
extremely humble beginnings to become one of Britain's most notable
politicians and the first Labour leader.His childhood and adolescence was characterised by gruelling hardship; he was loaded with responsibility at an early age. Born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, he was the illegitimate son of Mary Keir. He was sent to work as a baker's delivery boy aged eight without any schooling, and even though his mother had married David Hardie, James remained the sole wage-earner of the family. By the age of 11, Hardie was a coal miner. By 17 he had taught himself to read and write.
His career in politics began with the establishment of a worker's union at his colliery, and in 1881 he led the first ever strike of Lanarkshire miners. He continued to rise through the ranks of Scottish unionists and in 1893 he was among the group who formed the Independent Labour Party. At the opening conference, he was elected chairman and leader. 1899 saw the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, which eventually developed into the Labour Party.
After a long battle to win a seat, he was finally elected MP to Merthyr Tydfil in 1900 and was one of only two Labour MPs in Parliament. But by 1906 this number had increased to 26. Keir Hardie was elected leader of the party in the House of Commons, but was not very good at dealing with internal rivalries and he resigned from the post in 1908. From then on he devoted his energy to promoting the Labour Party and championing equality on an international scale. In 1910, 40 Labour MPs were elected to Parliament and Keir Hardie gave up the party leadership to George Barnes.
He is remembered for his pacifism, which inspired him in his attempt to organise a national strike in opposition to World War I, and for his support of women's suffrage, an unpopular view to hold at the time. He was much loved and hugely respected for his compassion. As Philip Snowden recounts in his autobiography (published in 1934) Keir Hardie held '...a profound belief in the common people. He believed in their capacity, and he burned with indignation at their unmerited sufferings'.
Sir Alexander Fleming (1881 - 1955)
Sir Alexander Fleming Fleming was a farmer's son
from Ayrshire in
Scotland. He moved to London at the age of 13 and later trained as a
doctor. In 1928 Fleming was research assistant to Sir Almroth Wright
working on bacteria. He accidentally discovered a mould on a set of
culture dishes, which were being used to grow the staphylococci germ
(which turns wounds septic). Fleming noticed that where there was mould
the germs had stopped developing.It was one of Fleming's colleagues who identified the mould as penicillin. Fleming subsequently tested the penicillin on animals, with no ill effects, and also used it to cure a colleague's eye infection.
After his initial discovery, Fleming did little more than keep a supply of the mould and return to his routine work. It was the scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain who developed penicillin further. Florey and Chain were chiefly responsible for the research which led to its success as a drug, although Fleming took most of the credit for the discovery and its subsequent development. Fleming had discovered the first antibiotic. However, it was not until the research work of Florey and Chain that penicillin could be produced as a drug. At first supplies of penicillin were very limited, but by World War II it was being mass-produced by the American drugs industry, and given to all soldiers before active service.