ClanTime

Botanists & Discover's                                       

A name famous in British botanical circles is that of Robert Brown, born at Montrose. Three Scots played significant roles in Einstein’s life; James Clerk Maxwell, David Hume, and this Scottish botanist.

Albert Einstein’s first “success story” was to express in mathematical terms the phenomenon called the Brownian movement after its observer, Robert Brown. “At the beginning of the nineteenth century”, writes Hilaire Cluny, biographer of Albert Einstein, “the Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, demonstrated by mixing pollen dust in water that the component particles of that water were subject to incessant movements, moving in irregular zigzags, without the intervention of any external influences such as currents or some other action… In 1902, Einstein reduced to a clear formula this disorderly movement of particles… It was an important advance, since it revealed the reality of molecules, which previously had been a matter of controversy.”

Hilaire Cluny also says that “Einstein’s basic philosophy was that of Kant, David Hume and above all Ernst Mach”, i.e. a Scotsman (Hume) and a German (Kant) who claimed Scottish ancestry! Ernst Mach, born in what is now Czechoslovakia, was an admitted disciple of David Hume. He adopted Hume’s positivism 100 per cent.

Alexander Wight, a tenant of Lord Ormiston, was probably the first man in Britain to sow turnips in drills and cultivate them with a plough.

David Douglas was born at Scone. He was a gardener, and worked as one in the Glasgow Botanical Gardens. In 1823 he went to the United States on a commission from the Royal Horticultural Society. Two years later he made another visit to America, and made several discoveries of plants, among them the fir tree called after him.

John Lamont, a Scot, went to Germany as a boy: as Johann von Lamont he became head of the famous Munich Observatory, and he was one of the two greatest authorities in his lifetime on terrestrial magnetism.

The honour of originating the Y.M.C.A is claimed for David Naismith of Glasgow.

Sir J.H.A. Macdonald, later Lord Kinsburgh, helped to pioneer the useful postcard. It is believed that the idea of the postage stamp was first proposed by a Dundee bookseller, James Chalmers. William and Robert Chambers of Peebles founded “Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal”, the pioneer of cheap popular periodicals.

James Gregory, a Scot, invented the reflecting telescope. James Gregory also opened the first Observatory of its kind in Britain. He independently discovered the law of refraction, set forth the binomial theorem in its general form, and was a principal discoverer along with Barrow, Newton and Leibniz of the differential calculus.

Sir Robert Christison, a Scottish toxicologist, who became President of the British Medical Association, was practically the first in Britain to put jurisprudence on a scientific basis.

In music, two of the greatest pianists of their day, Frederic Lamond (one of the last pupils of Liszt) and Eugen d’Albert, were born in Glasgow, and Frederic Lamond’s internationally known pupil is a Scot, Agnes Walker.

John Broadwood (1732-1812), an Edinburgh man, made the first grand piano and led the world in the manufacture of this instrument. His son became the personal friend of the leading musicians of the day, including Chopin and Beethoven.

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