And it was a Scottish watchmaker, Alexander Cumming, who patented the first flushing toilet. An early version was invented by Watt, the steam-engine pioneer, and used by customers including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.Ī 19th-century Scottish bookseller, James Chalmers, has a strong claim to being the inventor of adhesive postage stamps. Scots can also lay claim to the copy machine. The telephone, patented by Alexander Graham Bell, and John Logie Baird's television transformed communications. Industrial inventions include the steam engine - an age-old idea developed by Scotsman James Watt into an efficient machine that helped spark the Industrial Revolution. There are medical advances such as chloroform anesthetic - pioneered by 19th-century Scottish doctor James Young Simpson - the hypodermic needles created by physician Alexander Wood, and penicillin, discovered by another Scot, Alexander Fleming, while he was working at a London hospital. Still, the list of achievements is impressive for a country that today has a population of just over 5 million. 'A lot of these inventions were the result of collaboration with other people.' 'Talking about Scottish inventions as such can be quite difficult,' said Maria Castrillo, a curator at the National Library of Scotland who helped create a recent exhibition on Scottish innovations.

No wonder pro-independence First Minister Alex Salmond has approvingly quoted the title of a book by American historian Arthur Herman: 'How the Scots Invented the Modern World.'īut, experts caution, scientific discovery and invention are rarely solo acts. If Scotland splits from Britain after a referendum this week, it can stake a claim to inventions that transformed modern life, from surgical anesthetic and penicillin to TV, the telephone and even the flush toilet.

The land that gave the world haggis and tartan has produced so much more, from golf and television to Dolly the Sheep and 'Grand Theft Auto.' EDINBURGH - What has Scotland ever done for us? Plenty, it turns out.

How scotland invented the modern world