1In the 19th century, Scotland’s educational system produced many eminent scientists, engineers, inventors and medical doctors, in numbers which far exceeded those which could have been expected from a small country on the northwest fringe of the European continent. The foundation of these Victorian successes was perhaps laid during the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ of the preceding century. The distinctive features of Scottish schools and universities were hugely important too. In this paper we will examine some of the most important influences and achievements which guided the development of applied science in Scotland and, later, across the wider world.
2Some recurrent 20th century motifs typify the fictional representation of the Scottish professional doctor, scientist, engineer and teacher, both in the UK and in the wider Anglophone world. As examples, the friendly yet supremely professional medical doctors in the 1960s BBC TV series called Dr Finlay’s Casebook epitomised the concept of the Scottish family doctor. Scotty, the inventive, gritty engineer strove to maximise the efficiency of his engines in Star Trek. Professor McGonagall, of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School, is a scientist whose abilities and accomplishments seem almost magical and wizard-like. The strict (but compassionate and dedicated) Scottish schoolteacher is perhaps exemplified by Miss Jean Brodie, in the novel of Muriel Spark.
- 1 History Scotland, Sir James Young Simpson died – On this day in history. 6 May 2021. https://web.ar (...)
3We can surmise that these tropes have a foundation in real Scots who captured the public imagination in the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, Sir James Young Simpson (1811–1870) was Queen Victoria’s personal physician in Scotland and was a specialist obstetrician who pioneered the use of anaesthesia in childbirth. He was widely loved and respected, and on the day of his funeral, a Scottish holiday was declared and around 100,000 people watched the funeral cortege on its way to the cemetery in Edinburgh.1 The engineer and instrument-maker James Watt (1736–1819) transformed the efficiency of steam engines in 1769, by introducing and patenting a separate steam condenser, sparking the subsequent industrial revolution. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), is often depicted as a wizard-like old man and, as an inventor and co-founder of the science of thermodynamics, was the most famous British scientist of his time. John Anderson (1726–1796) was an important figure of the Scottish Enlightenment who is not so widely recognised today, but he was a much-loved teacher whose formal and informal ‘open-access’ lectures at the University of Glasgow were hugely popular with students and townspeople alike. His thoughts and actions on education in science and technology have impacted the succeeding centuries profoundly. We will examine John Anderson’s legacy later. Before that, it is important to illustrate the breadth and depth of some of the pioneering scientific accomplishments of Victorian and Edwardian Scotland, which ranged across physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, and of course, into the applied science that we call engineering.
4The innovations mentioned above were pioneered by some of the most prominent and well-known scientific practitioners of the 18th and 19th centuries. Some other examples will serve briefly to emphasise the breadth of Scottish inventiveness and scientific curiosity in the Victorian period.
5John Boyd Dunlop (1840–1921) was a veterinary surgeon who was born in Ayrshire, trained in Edinburgh, and who later settled in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to practice veterinary medicine. There, he was prompted by his son Johnnie’s dissatisfaction with the juddering ride of his little tricycle. Dunlop devised air-filled rubber tyres to smooth the bumps, and patented his invention of the pneumatic tyre (a term he coined) in 1888. Dunlop discovered to his astonishment that the air-filled tyre had already been patented 44 years before by another Scottish inventor, Robert William Thomson (1822–1873), before the latter’s discovery fell into oblivion and could be ‘re-invented’ (Johnson). Thomson was a prolific and ingenious inventor who also patented the re-fillable fountain pen, a mobile steam-powered crane, and the first successful steam-powered road tractor, the so-called “Thomson Steamer.”
6In Victorian Scotland, very few women succeeded in achieving scientific recognition. Williamina Fleming (1857–1911) became one of the first female astronomers in the world, perhaps helped by emigration to the ‘New World’. She was born in Dundee and became a student teacher in local schools at the age of fourteen. She married at the age of twenty, and with her husband, she emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts in 1878. Her husband abandoned her while she was pregnant with their young son, and when she was later working as a maid for the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, she was hired to analyse and classify stellar spectra. While working there, she developed a new classification system for stars, and she discovered the existence of White Dwarf stars and many nebulae, including the striking Horsehead Nebula (Haley). Her achievements were recognised in her home nation when she was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Astronomical Society of London in 1906.
7By the end of the 19th century, the increasing importance of science and medicine to human welfare was obvious. In 1895, the wealthy Swedish inventor and industrialist, Alfred Nobel, willed the establishment of prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The first prizes were awarded in 1901. One of the first prizes in chemistry was awarded to Sir William Ramsay (1852–1916), appropriately enough, for the discovery and isolation of previously unknown gases, known as the Noble Gases (Watson). Ramsay was born in Glasgow and educated there at its Academy and its University. After taking his PhD in Germany, he returned to work in Glasgow at Anderson’s College before moving to Bristol and then London. In his work with Lord Rayleigh at University College London, he succeeded in discovering and isolating the previously unknown gases—the Noble Gases—Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and Radon. He also isolated Helium, already known to exist in the Sun, from the Earth’s atmosphere for the first time.
8The global diaspora of Scottish emigrants was not confined to North America or the territories of the British Empire. Henry Faulds (1843–1930) worked as a missionary doctor for the Church of Scotland and established the first English-speaking mission in Japan, in 1874. Born in Ayrshire, he was a graduate of the University of Glasgow and trained in medicine at the city’s Anderson’s College. He was familiar with the work of Joseph Lister in antisepsis, at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and he introduced Lister’s antiseptic methods to Japanese surgeons. Most famously, Faulds was the first to recognise and demonstrate the absolute uniqueness of human fingerprints, and to emphasise their immense potential to revolutionise forensic science (Paton).
9These vignettes illustrate two important points: firstly, the wide range of scientific disciplines which benefited from the contributions of Victorian Scots. Secondly, the high rates of Scottish emigration, and the expansion of the British Empire, meant that their innovative contributions were achieved not only in Scotland, but internationally. Some of the most profound and enduringly consequential developments for the modern world were achieved by three of the most eminent Victorian Scots, as described in the next section.
Fig. 1. Scotland’s Victorian science: influences and legacy.
10The great scientist who became Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) was born William Thomson, in Belfast, to a family of Scots heritage. He was tutored by his father James, who became Professor of Mathematics in the University of Glasgow in 1832. William was a precocious student and attended his father’s university lectures from the age of ten. He published papers on the mathematics of Fourier when he was only seventeen, and he enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge to try to come first in its ‘Tripos’ Mathematics examination, in accordance with his father’s wishes. William came second and won the prestigious Smith Prize for innovative mathematics, so impressing his examiners that one of them (R. L. Ellis) said ‘you and I are just about fit to mend his pens’ (Smith). In 1846 he was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow, aged 22, only a few years after attending lectures there as an undergraduate. In a long career, he made many scientific and engineering breakthroughs, including the design of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. However, his crucial advance was to understand that heat was not a fluid, but rather an energy of motion, and with his Glasgow colleague William John Macquorn Rankine, and Rudolf Clausius, he defined the science of energy transfer—thermodynamics. He recognised the existence of an absolute zero of temperature and quantified it. He was ennobled as Lord Kelvin by Queen Victoria in 1892, and the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature is named in his honour. He became chancellor of the University of Glasgow in 1904, three years before his death. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, alongside the graves of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
11Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) was born in Edinburgh where his father was an elocutionist and teacher of the deaf. His father migrated the family to Canada when Alexander was just nineteen, to avoid the epidemics of tuberculosis which were plaguing British cities at the time. Alex became a teacher of the deaf, and a proponent of ‘Visible Speech’, a system of diagrams invented by his father to teach speech to people with impaired hearing (Burns). His interest in acoustics led him to invent a method of transmitting sound down a telegraph wire, and he patented the telephone in 1875. His device even astounded the great Sir William Thomson, when he saw it demonstrated in the U. S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (Bruce 1990, 188–99), he shouted, ‘Where is Mr Bell, I must see Mr Bell!’ For his part, Bell later recounted ‘what was my delight, when he addressed me, to hear a good broad Scotch accent tingeing his utterance!’ In 1878 Bell demonstrated his invention to Queen Victoria at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. She later wrote ‘After dinner we went to the Council Room and saw the Telephone. Professor Bell explained the whole process, which is quite extraordinary. It had been put in communication with Osborne Cottage, and we talked with Sir Thomas and Mary Boddulph, also heard some singing quite plainly. But it is rather faint, and one must hold the tube close to one’s ear’.2 Soon afterwards, two telephones were purchased for Osborne House for the price of £25 each.
12The Bell Telephone Company which improved and dominated the development of telephone systems had a strong research tradition, inherited from Graham Bell’s own experimental workshops. Its famous Bell Laboratories division has won 11 Nobel Prizes for inventions including the transistor, and the CCD charge-coupled devices now used to capture images in all our digital cameras. However, perhaps Bell Labs’ most significant Nobel award was for proving how the Universe began—the accidental detection in 1964 of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang, the radiation which permeates all of space and gives it a uniform temperature of 4 degrees Kelvin. The legacy of Alexander Graham Bell’s endeavours is far more than a breakthrough in telecommunications.
- 3 This famous quotation is widely cited (e.g. Basil Mahon, The Man who Changed Everything, Wiley, 200 (...)
13Finally in our review of Scottish scientific genius, we must remember James Clerk Maxwell, who was born in Edinburgh in 1831 and educated in the city’s ancient University and at the University of Cambridge. He was perhaps Britain’s most outstanding physicist and mathematician, as well as a philosopher of science, and an editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Maxwell made revolutionary contributions in many fields of science. He described the dynamics of gas molecules and explored ‘colourimetry’—the science of coloured light, showing that any colour of light can be created using red, green and blue light, a discovery that is the basis of all ‘RGB’ display screens in the modern world (Harman). His greatest achievement among many was the unification of two of the fundamental forces of nature, electricity and magnetism, and his equations showed how electromagnetic waves propagate at a constant speed, which is exactly the speed of light. It was quickly realised that light itself is an electromagnetic wave, self-sustaining, and requiring no ethereal medium to support its progress. Maxwell’s equations of electrodynamics encapsulate all we know, or need to know, about the electromagnetic force. The equations are not only profound, but also beautiful, and they prompted Albert Einstein’s development of his Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein said: ‘One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell’.3 Another famous Nobel prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, wrote: ‘From a long view of the history of mankind—seen from, say, ten thousand years from now—there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics’ (Feynman 1964, 111).
14We can see from these examples that in the 19th century, Scottish scientists were hugely innovative and productive across a wide range of disciplines. The Victorian period was the very opposite of a barren post-Enlightenment dark age. But we must ask the question—what were the foundations and enablers for such Victorian ‘productivity’?
15Scotland’s intellectual traditions, embodied in its schools and its five ancient universities, were important factors. From the foundations of universities at St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen in the 15th century, Scottish universities have been distinctive. The foundation of the University of St Andrews in 1410 had been prompted by the defection of Augustinian clergy from the University of Paris, due to the ‘Avignon schism’ in the Roman Catholic church, and from Oxford and Cambridge, at a time of continuing hostility and sporadic warfare between Scotland and England. During the schism, Scotland supported the Avignon ‘anti-popes’ Clement 7th and Benedict 13th. Bishop Henry Wardlaw of St Andrews had the confidence of Benedict, who confirmed the establishment of the new university by Papal Bull in 1413.
- 4 The ‘Rough Wooing’ was the name given to the wars between England and Scotland from 1543 to 1550, i (...)
16The University of Glasgow, founded in 1451, became the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world, followed by King’s College, University of Aberdeen, in 1495. The Scottish Reformation led by George Wishart and John Knox resulted in the Edinburgh Parliament approving the Protestant confession of faith in 1560, which rejected any papal jurisdiction over the country’s church or government. The aptly named ‘Rough Wooing’ of Mary Queen of Scots by English invasion,4 and her eventual forced abdication in 1567 after a tempestuous and tragic reign, firmly established Presbyterianism in Scotland. When the University of Edinburgh was founded in 1582, its authority was not derived from Rome or Avignon, but rather from the Town Council and a Royal Charter granted by the Stuart King, James the 6th. In Aberdeen, the 5th Earl Marischal, George Keith, established another so-called ‘Town College’ based on the same principles. The ‘Marischal College and University of Aberdeen’ was founded in 1593, thus endowing that northern Scottish city with two universities. In 1603, with the accession of King James also to the English throne, Scotland and England were united under a single monarch, but they retained their separate parliaments, Churches, laws and education systems.
17The old Scottish universities admitted their students at an early age and based their curricula on a broad range of subjects: Latin, Greek, Law and Mathematics, as well as Arts, Divinity and Medicine (or materia medica, the early forerunner of pharmacology). Scotland’s universities had strong contact with the universities of continental Europe, and it was common for Scottish students with sufficient wealth to supplement their studies in Paris, Leiden, Padua, or Heidelberg. Often only some proficiency in language was required for entry to the Scottish universities, and age or religion were no restriction to aspiring students, who often enrolled at age 16 or younger. The universities offered a broad-based curriculum of interdisciplinary studies including logic and philosophy as well as maths and science and avoided specialisation too early. This produced graduates equipped with a ‘Democratic Intellect’ in the memorable phrase of historian George Davie (Davie).
- 5 The recording of University student numbers in 1800 was inexact. The best estimate of student enrol (...)
18This policy of relatively open access to a broadly based higher education meant that by the year 1800, Scotland’s five ancient universities supported around 3,000 full-time or part-time students within the Scottish population of 1.6 million—so in other words, about 1 person in 500 was a student of some kind. We can compare this with the situation in England in the same year. A meagre total of around 1,600 students were enrolled in England’s two universities, within a population of 8.3 million—around 1 student per 5,000 of the English population.5 This represents a ten-fold disadvantage with respect to the student population per capita north of the border, although it must be recognised that many Scottish students studied part-time while working as teachers, tradesmen or apprentices, and while living at home, in stark contrast to the purely collegiate systems at Oxford and Cambridge. The historian R. D. Anderson has observed that:
Few countries have had universities as confined to the elite as England in 1800, and the new century was unlikely to leave Oxford and Cambridge untouched. While most European universities (including the Scottish ones) combined general education with vocational preparation for the professions or the bureaucracy, Oxford and Cambridge had turned their backs on professional education, and offered a narrow curriculum based on classics at Oxford and mathematics at Cambridge. Their students were sons either of the aristocracy and gentry, for whom university was a social finishing school as much as an intellectual experience, or of the clergy. So far as the universities had a vocational task, it was to supply clergy to the Church of England, of which they were an integral part. There were religious tests which confined their benefits to Anglicans, and most of the teachers were in clerical orders. (Anderson 1992, 12–13)
19Conversely, when an enquiry into ‘The Universities of Scotland’ was commissioned by the British government in 1826, it reported that the Scottish universities:
have always embraced Students of every variety and description; men advanced in life, who attend some of the classes for amusement, or in order to recal [sic] the studies of earlier years, or to improve themselves in professional education, originally interrupted; or persons engaged in the actual occupation of business, who expect to derive aid in their pursuits from the new applications of Science to the Arts; or young men not intended to any learned profession, or even going through any regular Course of University Education but sent for one or more years to College, in order to carry their education farther than that of the schools, before they are engaged in the pursuits of trade or of commerce. And all persons may attend any of the classes, in whatever manner may suit their different views and prospects. The system of instruction, by a course of elaborate lectures on the different branches of Science and Philosophy, continued daily for a period of six months, is admirably calculated to answer all the objects which such persons may have in view, as well as to afford much useful instruction to regular Students. (Anderson 1983, 29–30)
20Three successive attempts were made in the 19th century by the British government to reform the curricula of the Scottish universities, by making them less broad, less open, and more specialised (Davie, 1961). None of these attempts was wholly successful, and the Scottish universities retained their distinctive characteristics of early student entry at age 16 or 17 to a 4-year degree, and a widely based education, at least in the first years of study.
21Aside from the universities, there were of course other interacting influences on the development of Scotland’s science in the Victorian period, as depicted in Figure 1. The old Grammar schools and the newer, and more accessible Church of Scotland schools were crucial in developing widespread literacy and numeracy in the general population. The phenomenon of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment gave an intellectual foundation and confidence to exploit the opportunities presented by the expansion of the British Empire and to progress the Industrial Revolution. Consequently, the blooming of science in 19th century Scotland bequeathed a legacy in scientific and technical innovation, and in higher education in applied science, which is still evident today. Of the many examples of this legacy, we will focus now on one important progenitor of accessible education in applied science, by describing the influence of Professor John Anderson.
22Anderson was born near Glasgow in 1726 and like many of the Scottish intelligentsia, he was a ‘son of the Manse’—meaning that his father was a minister in the Church of Scotland, (as was his grandfather). John was educated at the Grammar School in Stirling and in the University of Glasgow where he graduated with the traditional broad-based degree in arts and sciences aged nineteen. In 1745 he was engaged in the Hanoverian British army which successfully defended Stirling against the Jacobite uprising of Highland clans seeking a restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Anderson retained a lifelong interest in firearms, and maintained a lifelong support for Whiggish politics, sometimes radically so, as when he later expressed sympathy for the French and American revolutions.
23After ‘The Forty-Five’ Anderson used his fluency in Latin and Greek to teach, and in 1750 he was in Glasgow tutoring students in the Classics. Somewhat ironically, Anderson then became a tutor to Francis Stuart, later the 9th Earl of Moray, and then tutor-companion to the son of Sir James Campbell on a tour of France. While in Bordeaux he became a Francophile: an admirer of the writings of Montesquieu and a supporter of the Republican tendency. While still in Gascony in December 1754, he received the news that he had been appointed as Professor of Oriental Languages (meaning Greek and Hebrew), at the University of Glasgow. Although he was fluent in Latin and had some classical Greek, in Hebrew he would be only one page ahead of his Divinity students, and his appointment was opposed by two other Scottish Enlightenment figures, William Cullen, Professor of Medicine, and Adam Smith, then the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow (Butt 1996, 3).
- 6 The Newcomen steam engine, invented in 1712, was practical in its main use of extracting water from (...)
24Anderson was soon appointed to a Professorial chair at Glasgow which was more suited to his talents, when he became professor of Natural Philosophy (that is, in modern terms, the physical sciences). He quickly became a highly popular teacher, delivering his lectures with zeal and enthusiasm, ranging across the fields of science into astronomy, geology, ballistics and chemistry, and animating his talks with demonstrations and explosions, which earned him the nickname of ‘Jolly Jack Phosphorus’. His evening classes in ‘Experimental Philosophy’ were advertised in newspapers, and his lecture theatre had to be extended twice to accommodate students. For two evenings a week he gave ‘anti-toga’ classes, requiring no formal dress, to ‘include town’s people of every rank, age and employment’. He was passionately convinced that science teaching should be practically useful and scientific theory open to challenge through experimentation: ‘theories without experiments have been the great bane of philosophy in every age and in every country’ (Muir 1950, 30). Anderson was an important mentor to the young James Watt, who was Glasgow University’s instrument maker at the time. When in 1763, he asked Watt to repair the physics department’s model of a Newcomen steam engine,6 it launched Watt on his trajectory as a steam engine pioneer.
25In 1759 and again in 1771, Anderson hosted the statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin in the American’s two visits to Glasgow, and they became friends and correspondents. It seems likely that Franklin influenced Anderson’s thinking on educational development. Four years before the first visit, Franklin had co-founded the College of Philadelphia, structured to be governed by Trustees (including Franklin) and not by its professors. The College emphasised the teaching of science and modern languages rather than Latin and Greek. It established the first medical school in the USA in 1765 and evolved to become the present-day University of Pennsylvania.
26Anderson’s popularity with students did not extend to his professorial colleagues at the University of Glasgow, with whom he continued to make enemies. He was vituperative about the behaviour of some of his fellow professors, agreeing that they were lazy, negligent, and sometimes, drunk. He was scathing about the mismanagement of the University and in 1784 he went over the head of the Principal to invite a Royal Commission to inquire into its poor governance. (Muir, 1950, 21–22).
- 7 Anderson also offered the design of his cannon to the USA, by writing to George Washington. See ‘En (...)
27Unpopular with his colleagues already, Anderson’s political views made him even more so. In his time in France he had come to believe in the separation of the powers of constitutional government as expressed in Montesquieu’s ‘The Spirit of Laws’, (De l’Esprit des lois) and later he supported the French and American Revolutions. Although his own achievements were as a teacher rather than a scientist, he invented an ingenious military cannon which had no recoil and could be mounted on a portable stand. When this proved of no interest to the British, in 1791 he travelled to Paris to present the design and an example of the cannon to the revolutionary Generals Lafayette, Custine and Dumouriez. As a result, he returned to Glasgow—at least in the view of his Tory colleagues—with his name and reputation blackened as a democrat and betrayer of his country. The cannons were then manufactured in France and used successfully in the Battle of Jemappes (1792) and the Siege of Maubeuge (1793).7
28John Anderson died in 1796. He was not himself a great scientist, and he has had little mention in the historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment. However, his ideas had great influence on scientific education in the 19th century, in Scotland and beyond. When he died, peacefully and still holding his Glasgow University professorship, his last Will and Testament specified that a new type of university should be established.
29Anderson’s will described in detail the structure of the proposed ‘Anderson’s University’, which was not to be governed by its professors but instead managed by Trustees drawn from agriculture, law, medicine, science, industry, and trade. The university was to have four faculties: Arts (which included science); Medicine; Law; and Theology. (Butt, 1996, 20). Remarkably, within a year of his death, Anderson’s Trustees had raised funds and enacted his plans. The Andersonian Institution was founded in 1796, with around 970 students by the end of the first year, half of them women, taking classes in ‘Arts and Manufactures’ meaning physics, chemistry, and various manufacturing processes. By 1800 the Institution offered a broad range of subjects including Natural Philosophy, Ethics, Logic, Law, Theology, Chemistry, Pharmacy and Mechanics, and later Anatomy and Midwifery. The Mechanics Class was split off in 1823 to form the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute, the world’s first and which became a model for many others. The Trustees’ good management of the Institution delivered successful growth through the 19th century, with many inspired professorial appointments such as George Birkbeck (1776–1841), Andrew Ure (1778–1857), and Thomas Graham (1805-1869), and producing many influential graduates including Henry Dyer who played a key role in the industrialisation of Japan, John Reith (Later Lord Reith) and John Logie Baird, who together founded the BBC’s television service, and David Livingstone, the renowned explorer of East Africa.
30One man was especially important in the development of Anderson’s University in the Victorian period. James Young (1811–1883) was born in Glasgow and studied chemistry under Thomas Graham in evening classes at Anderson’s University, where he was a contemporary and friend of fellow students David Livingstone and Lyon Playfair, who became a chemist, politician, and another champion of education in applied science.
31Young made a personal fortune when, after observing oil seeping through the walls and ceilings of coalmine tunnels, he developed a process to distil it to produce a new type of light oil—paraffin—from low-grade coal and shale. He founded the world’s first commercial oil-works company which produced paraffin for lamps and paraffin wax which revolutionised the production of clean, smokeless candles.
32James, known as James ‘Paraffin’ Young, became a Trustee of Anderson’s University in 1858. Ten years later he was its President and its most important benefactor. By then around 2,300 students were attending classes, about one third of them in medicine. Young began a long campaign to achieve wider recognition for the institution, including a failed attempt to achieve a Royal Charter of incorporation for the university.
33Thanks to Young and the other Trustees, Anderson’s University evolved and expanded rapidly throughout the 19th century, absorbing other institutions and changing names several times, as detailed in Figure 2. However, the Andersonian institution was restricted in its ability to award degrees, partly due to its older neighbour’s hostility and reluctance to acknowledge the presence of a second university in Glasgow. Young’s quest for Royal recognition and support was ultimately successful, but only 20 years after his death. In 1903, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra laid the foundation stone for a new Andersonian building: the Royal Technical College. Figure 3 shows the Royal couple and the large crowds which gathered in central Glasgow to watch the ceremony. The building was formally opened in 1905 and by 1909 it was the largest building in Europe devoted to technical education (Butt 1996, 104). Figure 4 is a photograph of the Royal College building pictured in 1909. The building still stands today as one of the principal buildings in the campus of the modern Andersonian institution, the University of Strathclyde, founded in 1964, which also incorporates an eponymous library and the John Anderson physics building.
Fig. 2. The evolution of Anderson’s University.
Fig. 3. King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra laying the foundation stone for the Royal College in 1903.
Credit: Glasgow City Council and the Mitchell Library
Fig. 4. The completed Royal College building photographed in 1909 (Credit: Glasgow City Council and the Mitchell Library).
34The creation and success of Anderson’s University attracted attention abroad, and in particular from one representative of the French government. Charles Dupin was born in the department of Nièvre in 1784, the son of a lawyer, and he studied economics.8 Dupin was appointed to the Academy of Sciences in 1818, made a Baron in 1825 and became an important politician appointed to the Senate of the French government later in life. Significantly, he was assigned to make an extensive tour of Great Britain between 1816 and 1820, to assess and analyse Britain’s industries, infrastructure and commercial power. His resulting report ‘The Commercial Power of Great Britain’ (Dupin 235) was epic in its scope and detail, and was published in two volumes running to almost 1,000 pages.
35When Dupin visited Glasgow, he was hosted and guided hospitably by the Professor of Chemistry at the Andersonian Institution, Andrew Ure. Dupin was greatly impressed. In his report, he wrote:
In 1795, Anderson, one of the professors of the University of Glasgow, founded for the encouragement of industry, the Andersonian Institution…(where) young artists are instructed in mathematics, geography, natural philosophy, chemistry, physics and pharmacy.
The administration of the establishment… deserves to be known…The professors are chosen, by a majority of votes, by the eighty-one commissioners.
Be it remarked that the government has no concern or influence directly or indirectly with this management!!! (Dupin 1820, 235–236)
- 9 From the article by Ronald Crawford Professor Anderson, Dr Franklin and President Washington in Les (...)
36When he returned to France, Dupin looked to find a way to apply John Anderson’s ideas in a French institution, and in 1819 he won the support of the Prime Minister, Decazes, and of Louis 18th, for ‘un texte révolutionnaire instituant en France une structure comparable à l’Institution andersonienne’.9
37This revolutionary Ordinance resulted in the complete restructuring of a 15-year-old museum of artifacts in Paris, the Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers, into a grand-école and University modelled on Anderson’s Institution: ‘une haute école d’applications des connaissances scientifiques au commerce et à l’industrie’.
38The reformed Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) was established in 1819, with Dupin appointed to the Professorship of Applied Mechanical Engineering, alongside the professors of Applied Chemistry and Industrial Economics.
39CNAM grew successfully through the 19th and 20th centuries, guided by its aim of emancipation through knowledge and lifelong learning for all. It now has 70,000 students, many campuses throughout and beyond France, and is the largest University in Europe in terms of budget for distance learning and continuing education.10 It is an institution clearly modelled on the educational philosophy of John Anderson.
- 11 Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, was an enthusiastic proponent of the technical universitie (...)
40Anderson’s ideas were well ahead of their time, and together with the other aspects of the Scottish educational system, influenced the development of higher education in applied science, worldwide. Some examples to illustrate this are shown in Figure 5. The idea of the technical university arguably began with the foundation of the École Polytechnique, which may have influenced Anderson’s thinking, though his papers make no reference to it. In the 19th century, the idea of polytechnic institutions modelled either on the École Polytechnique, or on Anderson’s University and CNAM, spread across Europe and beyond, also in the form of Mechanics’ Institutes and Technische Hochschulen in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.11
41The Andersonian Institution’s professor of physics, George Birkbeck, founded the London Mechanics’ Institute and was later accused of ‘sowing the seeds of evil’ by admitting women in 1830 to what has become Birkbeck College in the University of London. Birkbeck, with fellow Andersonian Andrew Ure, founded the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, on the Andersonian model. It is now the University of Technology, Sydney.
42In another consequential development in 1863, five Samurai scholars travelled to Britain from Chosu, Japan, to study science and engineering with the support of the Jardine-Matheson company. One of them, Yamao Yozo, went to Glasgow to study in the evenings at Anderson’s University and to work in a Clydeside shipyard. When Yozo returned to Japan he joined the Meiji Government and established the Imperial College of Engineering in 1877. The teaching staff of the College was led by the Andersonian alumnus Henry Dyer, as Principal and Professor of Engineering, with many other posts filled by the recommendation of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and William Rankine, Professor of Engineering at Glasgow University. Tokyo’s Imperial College created so-called ‘sandwich’ degrees on the model of Rankine’s degree course, interspersing student time between university studies and industrial apprenticeships, and the College became instrumental in the industrialisation of Japan (Butt 1996, 88–89).
43One of the most consequential, though tangential, Scottish influences on open education began with another Andersonian, the pioneer of television, John Logie Baird, who attended what had by then become the Royal Technical College between 1906 and 1914. At the College, Baird overlapped with another student, John Reith, who became Lord Reith, the first director-general and founding father of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC began broadcast television, using Baird’s equipment, in 1929. In the 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson resolved to set up a truly open university, using radio and television to enable distance learning. To implement the vision, Wilson appointed the Scottish Labour member of parliament, and Minister for the Arts, Jennie Lee, a graduate of Edinburgh University. Lee’s energy and determined commitment to the project enabled the Open University to enrol its first students in 1971. It is now the largest university in Britain by student numbers, (over 200,000).12 Its complete lack of entry requirements, broad curriculum, and support of lifelong learning is consistent with the ethos of the Scottish universities, and John Anderson’s vision.
Fig. 5. Some examples of the dispersal of Scottish democratic ideals of ‘useful learning’.
44The fictional tropes and popular archetypes of Scottish doctors, teachers, engineers and scientists are well-founded in many real-life examples. The 19th century in Scotland saw many pioneering inventions and scientific breakthroughs, perhaps most consequentially those of Lord Kelvin, Alexander Graham Bell, and James Clerk Maxwell. These advances were built on the foundation of the Scottish Enlightenment, and crucially, they were enabled by Scotland’s numerous, accessible and broad-based universities.
45The impacts of Scotland’s science and the Scottish ‘democratic’ intellectual tradition were far-reaching. One largely-overlooked figure of the Enlightenment, John Anderson, was a pioneer of open-access education in applied science and was an early advocate of lifetime ‘useful learning’ for both men and women. His ideas, and the Scottish model of a broad-based, easily-accessed university education, were further developed in the Victorian period. The structural design of many educational institutions across the world have been influenced by ‘Andersonian’ thinking, and more generally, the strong influence of Scottish models of education in science, engineering and medicine can be seen worldwide.
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