ALL this week, The Scotsman is profiling some of the greatest Scottish inventors - and giving you the chance to vote for the one you judge has made the greatest contribution to the modern world.
Choose from theorists such as James Clerk Maxwell, pioneers including James Watt and Alexander Graham Bell, or modern heroes such as James Black and Ian Donald, whose contributions to medicine are still saving lives today.
We will profile our sho
rtlist of 17, with big names such as TV trailblazer John Logie Baird and penicillin pioneer Sir Alexander Fleming, and tell the stories of some less well-known inventors, including James Goodfellow, who gave us the modern cash machine.
Follow the inventors in The Scotsman until next Saturday and vote using the information below.
Name: Alexander Fleming
Born: 6 August, 1881, Darvel, near Ayrshire
Died: 11 March, 1955, Chelsea, London
Claim to fame: Fleming was one of three scientists given the Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin.
IT WAS watching the agony of soldiers dying of septicaemia in the First World War which spurred Scottish doctor Alexander Fleming to become a bacteriologist.
Fleming was a brilliant researcher who discovered the body's antiseptic lysozyme and was made professor of bacteriology at St Mary's Hospital in London.
But it was an accidental discovery which was to make him one of the most famous scientists in the world.
In 1928 Fleming, who was notoriously untidy, left a petri dish smeared with staphylococcus lying out in his laboratory while he went on holiday for two weeks.
When he returned the Professor discovered the plate had been contaminated with mould and realised the germ was absent from the area around the spreading fungus.
Fleming preserved the mould-covered petri dish, realising that the inhibiting power of the fungus revealed its potential as the basis of a new drug.
Later he was to address young scientists about the importance of keeping an eye for the unexpected.
He said: "I have been trying to point out that in our lives chance may have an astonishing influence and, if I may offer advice to the young laboratory worker, it would be this - never to neglect an extraordinary appearance or happening."
Fleming discovered penicillin was effective against the pathogens which caused pneumonia, gonorrhoea and meningitis. However, he lacked the expertise to create a form of penicillin which worked in practice.
But in 1939 a specimen of Fleming's penicillin reached a team of scientists at Oxford University, including Australian biochemist Howard Florey and German scientist Ernst Boris Chain.
Finally Fleming's insight could be put to use as Florey and Chain worked out how to purify penicillin and successfully demonstrated how a dose of the new drug could cure mice which had been injected with lethal doses of bacteria.
When Fleming heard of their work he immediately made plans to visit them in Oxford to the astonishment of Chain, who was said to have remarked: "Good God, I thought he was dead."
With the Second World War looming it was more important than ever to find ways of fighting infection, and the Oxford team worked day and night to work out the process by which penicillin could be manufactured and used in the field. By the end of the Second World War millions of lives had been saved by putting Fleming's theory into practice.
Almost overnight a host of diseases which had once meant certain death, which included pneumonia, syphilis, gonorrhoea, diphtheria and scarlet fever, and many wound and childbirth infections had become treatable.
Fleming, along with Florey and Chain, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945 but, while the Oxford scientists shunned the publicity, the Scottish scientist embraced the limelight and became an international hero.
The tweed-suited Scottish doctor became friends with Marlene Dietrich, who believed he had saved two members of her family. She read his horoscope and he gave her a slide of penicillin in return.
Singer Josephine Baker dedicated a song to Fleming in a nightclub in Barcelona, Spanish bullfighters knelt in his honour and he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks jnr and Eleanor Roosevelt.
When wild stories began to circulate about how he had saved Winston Churchill from drowning as a boy Fleming said it was "a wondrous fable" and spoke of "the Fleming myth".
Despite his new-found fame, Fleming continued to research the possibilities of penicillin and he was one of the first to realised its limitations, realising that overuse and inadequate doses could lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Before his death Fleming was made a Baron for his role in the invention of a type of drug which transformed medicine forever.
In 2000 a Swedish magazine named penicillin the "Discovery of the Century", and estimated the invention of antibiotics had led to 200 million lives being saved.
As Fleming himself succinctly observed: "One sometimes finds what one is not looking for."
Name: Kirkpatrick Macmillan
Born: 2 September, 1812, Keir, Dumfries and Galloway
Died: 26 January 1878, Keir
Claim to fame: Inventor of the pedal bicycle
THERE are those who dispute the claim that Kirkpatrick Macmillan was the first person who thought of adding pedals to a bicycle. But others say it was only the natural modesty of the blacksmith from Dumfriesshire which prevented him from taking more credit or profiting from his invention.
And the earliest example of a bicycle in the Science Museum in London is the one made by Macmillan by welding pedals to the two-wheeled "hobby horse" developed by Baron von Drais.
Macmillan was in his twenties and working as a blacksmith for the Duke of Buccleuch when he first spotted a man riding on a hobby horse and decided to build his own. But the young man was disappointed by the lack of speed as he pushed the two-wheeled chariot along the bumpy back roads with his feet. He hit upon the idea of using a system of cranks and pedals to propel the machine and manufactured a piece of equipment at the family smithy in Courthill.
It was a heavy device, which used stiff rods, rather than a chain, to connect the wheels with the pedals, but Macmillan, who finished his prototype in 1839, was delighted with the invention.
He used his bicycle to take regular trips to Dumfries, 14 miles from the family house, and, in June 1842, set out on a two-day journey to Glasgow - a distance of 70 miles. During his visit to the big city, Macmillan earned himself one of the world's first fines for speeding after his contraption knocked over a little girl in the street.
Despite his great adventures as a cyclist Macmillan was a man who was content with his lot and never took the trouble to patent his design or exploit it for profit. He did make bicycles for other people, for a price of £7 each, but it was Gavin Dalzell, of Lesmahagow, who saw the potential in the design and became the world's first commercial manufacturer of bicycles.
For many years Dalzell, who began making his own cycles in 1846, was widely thought of as the inventor of the bicycle, but Macmillan's contribution emerged later, after his death.
Other inventors such as John Kemp Starley, Henry Lawson and the Michaux family added refinements to the design, adding a chain drive and gears. And it was the French in the 1860s who were really responsible for making cycling popular.
But few inventors can have derived as much pleasure from their creations as Kirkpatrick Macmillan did from his bicycle - which a 2005 survey declared the greatest British invention of all time. As a plaque on the family smithy in Kirkhall reads: "He builded better than he knew."
Name: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
Born: 26 June, 1824, Belfast
Died: 17 December, 1907
Claim to fame: Father of thermodynamics and creator of the Kelvin scale
BORN in Belfast, Thomson moved to Glasgow at the age of ten and immediately enrolled at the university where his father was the professor of mathematics. Schooled largely by his father, Thomson was an academic prodigy who rose to become one of the most hard-working and influential physicists of his day and who was given the chair of natural philosophy at the age of 22.
He corresponded with prominent physicists, including James Joule and laid the foundation for thermodynamics with his theories of "statical" and "dynamical" energy - or what we now call potential and kinetic energy.
He proposed an absolute temperature scale - named the Kelvin scale in his honour - which places the coldest temperature in the Universe at zero degrees Kelvin.
Thomson was elected a member of the Royal Society at the age of just 27 and published 660 scientific papers during his career, the first at the age of 16. His views about the age of the earth brought him into conflict with Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin, who called him an "odious spectre".
Thomson argued that the Earth was just 100 million years old, based on his calculations for how long it had taken to cool to its current temperature. This would not have been sufficient time for evolution to occur.
Thomson was vilified for his attempts to counter the theory of evolution, but his arguments were based on a wish for scientific rigour rather than any misplaced attempt to defend Christianity.
Current theories suggest the earth is 4,600 million years old - Thomson's calculations failed to take into account the counteractive effect of radiation, which was unknown at the time he was working.
Thomson is today regarded as one of the founding fathers of thermodynamics, but during his lifetime he was known as much for his role in the application of scientific ideas as the development of theory.
He was a member of the board of directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, whose aim was to lay a telegraph cable along the 3,000-mile seabed between Europe and North America.
Thomson spent months at sea working on the project, which finally succeeded in 1866 at the fifth attempt. The Times called it "the most wonderful achievement of this victorious century". Thomson was knighted for his part and became a public figure.
HOW TO ENTER
ONLINE: log onto
www.scotsman.com/scotlandsgreatestinventor and follow the instructions on how to vote.
E-MAIL: E-mail
greatinventors@scotsman.com. This is the only way of voting for inventors not on our list or adding comments.
TEXT: text the word INVENTOR followed by a space, then the numeric code of the inventor you would like to vote for followed by a space - then your name, a space, then your postcode. Send to 81800 (charged at standard network rate
third parties.
1001 John Logie BAIRD
1002 Alexander Graham BELL
1003 James BLACK
1004 Ian DONALD
1005 John Boyd DUNLOP
1006 Alexander FLEMING
1007 James GOODFELLOW
1008 Lord KELVIN
1009 Charles MACINTOSH
1010 Kirkpatrick MACMILLAN
1011 James Clerk MAXWELL
1012William MURDOCH
1013 James Young SIMPSON
1014 Robert WATSON-WATT
1015 James WATT
1016 Ian WILMUT
1017 James 'Paraffin' YOUNG
Terms and Conditions
TEXT: You will only be charged your standard network rate, charged to
your mobile phone bill. By supplying your telephone number, you are happy
to receive SMS/MMS messages from Johnston Press plc, publishers of The
Scotsman. Johnston Press (or via its agents) and its business partners may
contact you about new promotions, products & services. Please add STOP
at the end of your message if you don’t wish to receive these.
