Scottish Inventions and Discoveries - Scientific Innovations

Scientific Innovations

• Logarithms: John Napier (1550–1617)
• The theory of electromagnetism: James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)
• The first theory of the Higgs boson or "God Particle" by Englishman Peter Higgs particle-physics theorist at the University of Edinburgh (1964)
• Popularising the decimal point: John Napier (1550–1617)
• The world's first oil refinery and a process of extracting paraffin from coal laying the foundations for the modern oil industry: James Young (1811–1883)
• The Gregorian telescope: James Gregory (1638–1675)
• The concept of latent heat: Joseph Black (1728–1799)
• The pyroscope, atmometer and aethrioscope scientific instruments: Sir John Leslie (1766–1832)
• Identifying the nucleus in living cells: Robert Brown (1773–1858)
• Hypnotism: James Braid (1795–1860)
• Incandescent light bulb: James Bowman Lindsay (1799-1862)
• Transplant rejection: Professor Thomas Gibson (1940s) the first medical doctor to understand the relationship between donor graft tissue and host tissue rejection and tissue transplantation by his work on aviation burns victims during World War II.
• Colloid chemistry: Thomas Graham (1805–1869)
• The kelvin SI unit of temperature: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907)
• Devising the diagramatic system of representing chemical bonds: Alexander Crum Brown (1838–1922)
• Criminal fingerprinting: Henry Faulds (1843–1930)
• The noble gases: Sir William Ramsay (1852–1916)
• The cloud chamber recording of atoms: Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869–1959)
• Pioneering work on nutrition and poverty: John Boyd Orr (1880–1971)
• The ultrasound scanner: Ian Donald (1910–1987)
• Ferrocene synthetic substances: Peter Ludwig Pauson in 1955
• The MRI body scanner: John Mallard and James Huchinson from (1974–1980)
• The first cloned mammal (Dolly the Sheep): Was conducted in The Roslin Institute research centre in 1996
• The seismometer innovations thereof: James David Forbes
• Metaflex fabric innovations thereof: University of St. Andrews (2010) application of the first manufacturing fabrics that manipulate light in bending it around a subject. Before this such light manipulating atoms were fixed on flat hard surfaces. The team at St Andrews are the first to develop the concept to fabric.
• Macaulayite: Dr. Jeff Wilson of the Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen.