Scotland, Land of Invention, 1940

[Music] [Music] [Music] so Walter Scott called Scotland Stern and wild her sons knew that he spoke the truth their mother is beautiful but she is as hard and fierce as necessity and necessity they say is the mother of invention the early scotsmen had to use their wits and look ahead in time they found there was little to be gained from fighting and thieving though they had practiced those arts for many a year they could only hope to survive in a land like that by using Ingenuity the need for the gift brought the gift and there is a Latin by word that tells you what happened it speaks to the perfered Ingenuity of the Scot other things have been said of the Scot that are not so flattering one of them was that the noblest Prospect for the Scotsman was the high road to England well to look at a high road is an inspiring thing but it is even nobler to make one it was a Scott who made the modern road we use the name of John McAdam often without knowing it and he is the first ingenious man whose work you will see McAdam was born in airshire in 1756 he laid down Boulders then layers of broken granite and over the top he rolled a smooth durable surface and soon netted his country with the first good Coach Road seen since the time of the Romans he has written his signature in a wide sprawling hand in the macadamized road all over the Earth and perhaps the most ingenious of them all was James Watt here is a gateway at Glasgow University named after him and this is the notebook in which he wrote the ideas that have changed our lives he was a man who tamed for our use the steam engine it was known long before what that steam could generate power by forcing a piston along a [Music] cylinder the farthest we had got was the engine devised by newcom of darmouth in 1663 it was worked by cooling steam in a cylinder and creat creating a vacuum wat kept the cylinder hot and used separate vessels for condensing the steam he used the steam itself and not the atmospheric pressure to force the Piston along in short he found the principles and Machinery by which later men could send the locomotive roaring along the track at 80 mph by his invention another Noble Prospect was opened up another highway to the South 2 years before mcam and a few miles from his birthplace William Murdoch was born when his wealthy neighbor young Mr James bosel was on his way to London and his great discovery and while his poor neighbor the crofter's lad Robert Burns was reading everything he could lay his hands on the boy Murdoch was stealing pieces of coal and finding out some of their remarkable properties [Music] he crushed his little pieces of coal into the bowl of a clay pipe he found that if he heated this bowl a gas was given off at the mouthpiece he lit this gas and found a light that put to shame the Tallow deps of his father's Cottage many years later in 1792 he had set up the first gaslighting installation in the world by 183 he had found out how to store gas and had begun to light up great cities about this time another unexpected thing happened James naith of Edinburgh was thinking in terms of Steel he was the great Hammerman he forged his engines in his foundaries and hammered them into shape with his mighty Hammer his huge iron work at Bridgewater handled heavy metal as if it were macaroni 10 years before the steam hner the work of naith had been made possible by JB nielson's Improvement on the blast furnace the blast furnace was an old story in 1829 when neelon put his ideas into practice of the Clyde Iron Works in Glasgow modern casting may be said to date from him but the most imaginative of the work is iron was Thomas tord the son of a damire shepherd He was born a year after Burns and was not a bad poet himself he was first a her boy then an architect then the greatest civil engineer and bridge builder of his time he made the Goa canal in Sweden and the Caledonian canal in Scotland and hundreds of roads and bridges he was the first to use steel for bridge building [Music] this little ruin is the birthplace of a very remarkable man indeed it is The tfan Mill at Len Lithgow where Henry Bell was born in 1812 a curious looking ship astonished the Dwellers on the banks of the CDE it was of 25 tons burden it moved a 7 knots an hour it was driven by an engine of no fewer than three horsepower it was called the Comet it was built by a carpenter with a bent for engineering he was this Scotsman Bell who had decided to do something about the sea the men of Glasgow and its Port laughed at the little Comet but they dug their River deeper they saw dimly in the future the tremendous litter of Monsters the tough little puffer would bring forth the mind of the grck Joiner tuned in across the Atlantic with the mind of the American Fon and between them they conquered the sea as another Bell and another American were later to conquer the [Music] air iron ships demanded a new compass and it was from Glasgow that this Compass came it must be confessed the inventor was not a Scotsman but the great Lord Kelvin lived in Scotland all his life and Ingenuity is catching another friend of the ship master was Robert Stevenson he built the Bell Rock Lighthouse and devised the intermittent and flashing lights and the M Lantern for light chips he was the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson [Music] this is the house in Edinburgh where Alexander Gram Bell was born in 1847 you may or may not be grateful but it is thanks to Graham Bell that you can hear me now for he was the first to transmit the human voice along an electric wire he was the third of three generations of bells who had studied the human voice he recorded it on a phonograph he picked it up with his machine and carried it first from one room to another and then over the world we can now as you see talk solemn nonsense to the antipodes and hear them reply and in Edinburgh 2 lived James Young Simpson professor of Midwifery at the Edinburgh University whose ideas met those of the American Guthrie and resulted in chori form this is the early apparatus used by him it is hard to believe that thousands of righteous victorians Rose in their WTH at this they said that God had ordained pain and that it was impious to make a patient unconscious of it Simpson thought he knew as much about Divine ordinances as the victorians he went ahead and many of us have caused to be grateful to his memory from his early Discovery has evolved the wonderful anesthetic apparatus of today here is the capital city of that strange Restless inquiring country even today it numbers less than the population of London it is still a hard land to live in Edinburgh is a town of dur people fine strong buildings and a terrible East Wind but it seems to be a good soil for inventive Geniuses who have given their discoveries to [Music] mankind if you go along Prince Street and toward the Calton Hill in Edinburgh you will find the grand new building St Andrew's house which they have built to house the government of [Music] [Music] Scotland a broad place with hundreds of rooms in which men work continuously on the greatest and most difficult problem of all how to govern the Scots [Music] to [Music]