When someone asks what Scotland has ever done..
Despite being a nation of just ~6 million people, we have continually contributed a disproportionately large amount to the rest of the world. The influence and marks of the Scots can be found all throughout the fields of transport, heavy industry, medicine, technology, science, communications, agriculture, economics, politics. civil engineering, and much more.
For example, all of these well-known innovations, inventions, and discoveries have come from Scots:
the television (John Logie Baird)
the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell)
the refrigerator (William Cullen)
the flush toilet (Alexander Cumming)
the bicycle (Kirkpatrick Macmillan/Thomas McCall)
the pneumatic tyre (John Boyd Dunlop/Robert William Thomson)
the steam engine (James Watt)
the postage stamp and postmark (James Chalmers)
radar (Robert Watson-Watt)
underlying principles of radio (James Clerk Maxwell)
modern economics (Adam Smith)
modern sociology (Adam Ferguson)
modern geology (James Hutton)
electromagnetism theory (James Clerk Maxwell)
the first oil refinery (James Young)
criminal fingerprinting (Henry Faulds)
the first cloned mammal (Roslin Institute)
the hypodermic syringe (Alexander Wood)
the ultrasound scanner (Ian Donald)
the MRI scanner (John Mallard)
vaccine for typhoid fever (William B. Leishman)
penicillin (Alexander Fleming)
general anaesthetic (James Young Simpson)
and there are many, MANY others which i haven’t listed.
For a small country, which has faced a lot of oppression, strife, and poverty over the years, we have accomplished vastly more than many others. So much of modern medicine, technology, politics, and economics can be traced back to the influence and innovation of Scots. Over the years we have been forced to migrate throughout the new world because of poverty, or forced eviction by oppressors (ie. the Highland Clearances), but we have always established ourselves wherever we fell, and built from the ground up, and we have always been an asset to whatever community we have joined. We have never lain back and accepted defeat, we pick ourselves up and keep fighting onwards towards success.
Do not be ignorant of the accomplishments of the Scots, or of Scotland. Any of you with Scottish blood should feel so proud to be connected to such an resilient and innovative nation. Alba gu bràth!!
dededos
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
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