How Scotland shaped the modern world

ON FRIDAY the National Museum of Scotland will open a new permanent gallery chronicling the story of modern Scotland.

Tracing the Scottish experience from 1900 to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament as the century drew to a close, Scotland: A Changing Nation will show how war, politics, economics and social change have shaped Scotland. The Scotsman will spend this week celebrating modern Scotland. Today we explore how Scottish inventiveness and ingenuity has shaped the modern world.

THE Scots have always been an inventive bunch. Perhaps the ingenuity was honed by days spent mulling things over while taking shelter from the rain.

Maybe the inventiveness is because the Scots are lazy. Indeed, many Scottish innovations have had a labour-saving slant: Macmillan spent years devising a pedal bicycle to make his daily cycle easier, and Bell's first phone call was a request to his assistant to come into a room ten metres away.

Even today, can we be sure that the Scottish creators of Dolly the Sheep did not undertake their cloning work just to take the effort out of human reproduction?

Or, it may simply be that, over the years, the Scots have been willing to embrace more left-field solutions to problems.

Early Scots, for instance, had no hesitation in donning a plaid skirt coupled with a furry bag to solve their clothing crisis, while Scottish chefs' answer to the ongoing hunger problem was to stuff a sheep's stomach with offal and oats, and, latterly, dip a Mars Bar in batter – filling a gap in the Scottish dinner menu that the country did not know it had.

The Scots even improved the design of the humble sausage, flattening the breakfast staple after noting that the existing tubular shape pitched rather too easily off a breakfast roll .

But what of our list? Compiled in collaboration with the National Museum of Scotland to help commemorate the opening of its Scotland: A Changing Nation gallery, does it truly represent the cream of Scottish inventive graft?

Naturally, there are a few innovations that did not quite make it. The use of antiseptic, for instance, was pioneered in Glasgow by Joseph Lister, but he was actually born in Essex.

Try as we might, we could not consider the Buick car as an invention, even though the company grew from an engine manufacturer set up by David Buick from Arbroath. Likewise, the US Navy is not strictly an innovation, despite the fact it counts Scotsman John Paul Jones as its founder.

More controversially, golf failed to er, make the cut, partly because of ongoing confusion over its origins, but also because golf widows across Scotland might doubt its importance to the human race.

Medical advances were less easy to dismiss. Modern medicine would not be possible without Scottish pioneers, a fact illustrated sharply by the inventions we had to omit.

The hypodermic syringe, for instance, was developed by Edinburgh doctor Alexander Wood, who first injected a patient with morphine in 1853. And while the work of Simpson and Leishman is represented, we have no room for John Macleod, awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in treating diabetes with insulin.

These and other forgotten advances, such as the thermos flask, the fax machine and the digestive biscuit show that, despite the quality of the selections you see here, the strength of Scottish inventiveness is best illustrated by the innovations that we cannot include.

As ever, our choice is subjective, with consideration given to the significance of the development at the time as well as its ongoing resonance.

We inevitably include some medical discoveries, and technological changes that truly dominate the modern world.

But we also commemorate less glamorous innovations such as logarithms and the pneumatic tyre, both vitally important to billions of people every single day.

So, take some time to peruse our list, do some traditional Scottish thinking, make your choice, and you could win dinner for two as well as a family membership to the National Museums of Scotland, see below.

OUR FATHERS OF INVENTION

1 The adhesive postage stamp
James Chalmers

A publisher from Arbroath, Chalmers produced stamps at his Dundee printworks in 1834 to further his idea of pre-paid postage. After sending examples to Rowland Hill's postal reform committee that may have been the inspiration for Hill's pre-paid envelope scheme, Chalmers posted the first envelope bearing an adhesive stamp to the GPO on 2 October, 1839.

2 Anaesthesia with chloroform
James Young Simpson

Before Simpson pioneered the use of chloroform to help women give birth painlessly, doctors used "laughing gas" or opiates to dull the pain, but neither worked as an anaesthetic and their use did not allow for complicated surgery. Simpson's use of chloroform on Queen Victoria during childbirth singles him out as the father of anaesthesia.

3 Beta-blocker drugs
Sir Joseph Black

Black developed beta-blockers during his work at ICI between 1958 and 1964 and was presented the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988. He turned his attention to heart disease after his father died of a heart attack and produced Propranolol – a drug that made adrenaline flow more slowly. beta-blockers have since been used to treat millions of people.

4 The cash machine
James Goodfellow

Goodfellow was working for Glasgow company Kelvin Hughes when he was asked by Midland Bank in 1965 to find a way for customers to withdraw cash when the bank was closed. After rejecting retinal scans and fingerprints, he settled on a numerical code to be punched in to an automated teller.

5 Coal-gas lighting
William Murdoch

Born in Cumnock in 1754, Murdoch walked 300 miles to Birmingham to work with James Watt. During his time there, Murdoch experimented with lighting from gas from heated coal. In 1792 he lit his entire house with piped gas, paving the way for today's domestic gas industry.

6 Logarithms
John Napier

Napier first proposed the logarithmic method in 1614, allowing significant advances in mathematics, physics and astronomy. His work is regarded as laying essential groundwork for Isaac Newton's later breakthroughs.

7 The pedal bicycle
Kirkpatrick Macmillan

A Dumfries blacksmith born in 1812, Macmillan first fashioned a self- propelled hobby-horse before spending ten years developing a machine powered by pedals. His invention was finished in 1839, never patented and was widely copied.

8 Penicillin
Alexander Fleming

In 1928 Fleming returned from holiday and noticed that a culture plate containing staphylococcus bacteria had been left out in the lab. On it had grown mould that had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. Experiments showed the mould prevented bacterial growth. Fleming named the substance penicillin.

9 The pneumatic tyre
John Boyd Dunlop

Another Scot, Robert William Thomson, was granted the first patent for an air-filled tyre in 1846 for his leather-clad design. But in 1888 Dunlop invented a tubular prototype that became the first commercially viable inflatable tyre, the precursor to the model we see today.

10 Radar
Robert Watson-Watt

Born in Brechin, Watt was interested in detecting the presence of storms using radio. In 1934 he was seconded by the Air Ministry to invent a "death ray" to shoot aircraft from the sky using radio waves. Watt dismissed the idea, but in 1935 demonstrated, and was granted a patent for, a working radar system.

11 The steam engine
James Watt

Although steam engines existed before Watt's intervention, his 1769 patent for a separate condenser unit connected to the main cylinder became the basis for the engine that powered the Industrial Revolution. A Greenock native, Watt was commemorated by providing the name for the watt unit of power.

12 Tarmacadam roads
John Macadam

Macadam was born in Ayr and was appointed surveyor to the Bristol Turnpike Trust in 1816. There he remade roads by raising them from the ground and building a base of large rocks covered in tightly bound gravel, all built with a camber to help water drain away. His system remains the basis of road construction today.

13 The telephone
Alexander Graham Bell

Born and educated in Edinburgh, Bell emigrated to Canada before moving to the US and becoming professor of vocal physiology at Boston University in 1872. His work led to the first successful two-way transmission of speech via electricity in March 1876 and the first long-distance telephone call five months later.

14 The television
John Logie Baird

The television was first demonstrated by Helensburgh's Baird on 26 January, 1926 to a group of 50 scientists in London. A year later, he improved on that feat by transmitting pictures along 400 miles of telephone cable between London and Glasgow.

15 Vaccine for typhoid
Sir William B Leishman

Leishman, a bacteriologist and pathologist, born in Glasgow in 1865, was knighted after spending a decade on an effective typhoid vaccine. When the First World War broke out, his work allowed 170,000 inoculations to be issued to troops, saving an estimated 77,000 lives.