Celebrating Scottish Inventions

The Edinburgh International Science Festival starts on Monday 2nd April, so I thought I'd take a look at Scottish contributions to science and engineering - there are hundreds of them, after all. Sometimes it's not so simple, of course - John Logie Baird invented the television, but so did American Philo Taylor Farnsworth and Russian Vladimir Zworykin; Alexander Graham Bell invented and patented the telephone, but Elisha Gray built his own telephone independently and concurrently.

We Scots even invented football, apparently.

In modern science and engineering, it's a fallacy to look for single inventors and discoverers, because science is a collaborative, iterative process, always building on what has gone before. Nevertheless, names do stand out: James Clerk Maxwell is uttered in the same breath as Newton and Einstein (or at least he should be); John Napier's logarithms revolutionised mathematics. And if James Watt didn't actually invent the steam engine, his improvements turned it into an efficient, effective machine.

What worries me, however, is that there is not enough celebration of these inventors, scientists, doctors and engineers. There are very few books on these Scottish greats. The books on John Logie Baird are old and outdated; ditto James Clerk Maxwell, Alexander Fleming and Alexander Graham Bell. John Napier fares better, thankfully, and James Hutton is well served by The Man Who Found Time.

But where's the biography of Sir James Young Simpson, the physician to Queen Victoria who revolutionised childbirth by introducing anaesthetics, against strong religious opposition?

Doesn't Sir David Brewster, the physicist who (re)invented the kaleidoscope, deserve a book? What about William Thompson, the first Baron Kelvin, whose work on thermodynamics is remembered in the Kelvin scale? There must be a philatelist ready to write a biography of James Chalmers, the inventor of the adhesive postage stamp?

Have a look a list of Scottish inventors on Wikipedia, and compare it to a list of books on inventors and inventions. That's quite a gap to fill. Which Scottish publishers and authors will rise to the challenge?

What I'm currently reading:

• The English Spy by Donald Smith
  
• Vellum by Hal Duncan