Great Scots

Britannia Home
History Home
Travel Home
Wales Home

SCOTLAND
Scotland Home
History of Scotland
History Timeline
Great Scots
Scotland Attractions

TRAVEL GUIDES
London
Earth Mysteries
Virtual Tours

TRAVEL RESOURCES
UK Vacations
UK & London Hotels
Travel Directories
Resource Centre
Reservations Centre
Packing Guide
Currency Converter
ATM Locator
UK Weather
UK Phonebook

GUIDE BOOKS
Pitkin Guides
Britain & England
London

TRAVEL SERVICES
Airport Transfers
Car Rental


Scots Who Made A Difference

T & U
TAIT, ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL (1811-82)
From Edinburgh, Tait rose in the hierarchy of the Church of England to become Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury. He entered Balliol College, Oxford as a Presbyterian but switched to the Anglican faith, becoming a curate after leaving college. When the Oxford Movement, led by converted Catholic John Henry Newman began its vigorous attempts to convince the Church to return to pre-Reformation forms of worship, its Anglo-Catholicism seemed too radical for many churchmen and Tait became the spokesman for the moderates.

Always interested in education, Tait succeeded the venerable Thomas Arnold as head master at Rugby, at the time Britain's most prestigious school. Dean of Carlisle Cathedral in 1849, he served on the royal commission of 1850-2 that advised reform at Oxford University. In 1856, he was appointed Bishop of London where he continued to appease those on the left and right of the controversy concerning the re-introduction of ancient liturgical practices.

After becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1868, Tait made enemies in the Church by working to ensure the passage of the bill to disestablish the Church of Ireland. He also supported the Burials Act of 1880 that legalized non-Anglican burial services in Anglican churchyards. In 1867, he served on the royal commission on ritual. His whole career was devoted to the cause of reconciliation in the face of stern opposition from High-church officials. As a Scot (and former Presbyterian) he must have been a wee bit suspicious of their motives. His writings include The Dangers and Safeguards of Modern Theology (1861) and Harmony of Revelation and the Sciences (1864).


TAIT, PETER GUTHERIE (1831-1901)
Edinburgh physicist and mathematician Peter Tait helped develop modern mathematical physics. His later work was especially important to the newly emerging concept of energy and its properties. However, before this he worked with the Irish chemist Thomas Andrews at Queen's College, Belfast, to research the density of ozone and the effect of electric discharges on oxygen and other gases. Another of Tait's contributions to modern science was the development of the system of advanced algebra called quaternions that gave rise to vector analysis.

Vector analysis is a branch of mathematics that deals with quantities having both magnitude and direction. Tait's notable contribution to the theory was set out in his Elementary Treatise on Quaternions (1867), followed by Introduction to Quaternions (1873). Tait then went to work with the noted physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) to produce his Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867) tracing the concept of conservation of energy to the pioneering work of Newton himself. Tait continued to research thermoelectricity and thermal conductivity, and in collaboration with Scottish physicist Balfour Stewart wrote The Unseen Universe (1867) that created enormous interest and led to a sequel Paradoxical Philosophy (1878).


TEDDER, ARTHUR WILLIAM TEDDER, 1st Baron (1890-1967)
From Glenguin, Stirling, Arthur William Tedder rose to become Marshal of the British Royal Air force and World War II Deputy Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force under American General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Tedder started his long and distinguished military career as a soldier in 1913 but transferred to the Royal Flying Corps three years later. Rapidly rising in his new career, in 1936, he became head of the Far East Command and then the RAF's director of research and development. During the early days of the Second World War, Tedder headed the Middle East Command and later all Allied air operations in North Africa and Italy. Complete air superiority (helped by the breaking of code Enigma by British intelligence) gave Tedder's air forces control of the Mediterranean. This contributed enormously to the defeat of the German armies in North Africa and the debunking of the legends surrounding Rommel as well as to the successful allied landings in Sicily and southern Italy.

In 1944, Tedder was appointed as General Eisenhower's deputy and was given control of allied air operations in Western Europe. During the assault on Normandy's beaches, the air was kept clear of Nazi airplanes and German reinforcements were kept from reaching the beachhead through Tedder's incessant interruption of fuel dumps and supply lines. Following the breakout of allied forces; allied bombing completely disrupted the German transportation network and significantly speeded up the defeat of the Reich. After the War, Tedder was appointed first peacetime chief of the British air staff and senior member of the air council. He was elevated to the peerage in 1946.


TELFORD, THOMAS (1757-1834)
The name of Thomas Telford, from Westerkirk, Dumfries, is held in awe whenever road engineering and bridge building is discussed. If it is not, it ought to be, for his contributions to the art and science of crossing mountains and rivers in the most efficient, economical and speediest ways possible are legend.

Telford's accomplishments include his early work as surveyor of Shropshire, the county that straddles the English-Welsh border: the bridges over the River Severn at Montford, Buildwas and Bewdley all completed in the 1780's. In 1793, Telford began work as engineer for the Ellesmere Canal Company, completing his monumental aqueducts that carried the canal over the valleys of the rivers Ceiriog and Dee in North Wales.

In the early days of the industrial revolution canals were built to transport raw materials and newly manufactured goods to all parts of the British Isles. William Telford solved what seemed to be the insurmountable problem of taking the Shropshire Union Canal across the narrow, steep-sided Dee valley in North Wales. His answer was the justly famous Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, the longest and highest in Britain. The name, unpronounceable to most English visitors, simply means, "connecting bridge."

Completed in 1805, one month after the Battle of Trafalgar, the 121-foot high aqueduct is 1007 feet in length, carrying the canal in a completely water tight, cast-iron trough supported by 18 piers. It is a bit of a shock to see barges merrily and magically glide across an expanse of sky high above the valley below and its road to Chirk (where another Telford masterpiece, the Chirk Aqueduct, takes the canal across the River Ceiriog).

Telford then left for Scotland, where he was responsible for the Caledonian Canal that opened up the lowlands to industry; the harbour works at Aberdeen, Dundee and other rapidly growing port cities. In his native Scotland, he was responsible for building more than 900 miles of roads and their attendant bridges. He then returned to Wales, managing to engineer the main highway from Shrewsbury and Chester all the way to Holyhead in northwest Wales by carefully selected routes through the mountains that would provide the least gradient.

Completed in 1826, Telford's suspension bridge over the River Conwy seems to go right into the Edwardian Castle itself. Its wrought-iron links that suspend the deck have never rusted; Conwy residents say that Telford had the bright idea of dipping the links in oil. During the same year, Telford also completed his crowning masterpiece, but a few miles distant, The Menai Bridge, when built, the longest suspension bridge in the world. It takes the highway across the treacherous Menai Straits to link the Island of Anglesey with the Welsh mainland.

Telford's works can be seen all over Europe: they include a canal in the English midlands, canal tunnels in the north country, the Gota Canal in Sweden; St. Katherine Docks in London and roads that opened up the Scottish Highlands. If any Scot made a difference to countless generations, it surely was Thomas Telford. His work in improving highways and bridges, canals and road made much of the Industrial Revolution possible, for they provided means of transporting, men, machinery, raw materials and finished goods.


TEY, JOSEPHINE (1897-1952)
Inverness-born Elizabeth MacIntosh used the pseudonym Josephine Tey to produce her many novels and plays. A former physical education teacher, Miss Tey turned full-time to literature in 1929 with the success of her first book The Man in the Queue. She used another pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, to produce some of her plays including the highly successful Richard of Bordeaux (1933).

Tey's most well known works are her detective fiction that often feature Inspector Grant. They include Miss Pym Disposes (1947) and The Franchise Affair (1949). In 1951, she caused a sensation in literary and historical circles with the publication of her historical novel The Daughter of Time, which attempts to restore the good name of Richard III so blackened by Shakespeare. She also wrote The Singing Sands (1952).


THOMAS THE RHYMER (1220-97)
Though Sir Tristrem was not printed until 1804 by Sir Walter Scott, the author of the old metrical romance is thought to have been Thomas the Rhymer, poet and prophet from Earlston, Berwick. The medieval writer did not become known, however, until Sir Walter Scott included "Thomas the Rhymer" in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, completed in 1803. In the early 15th century, the prophecies of Thomas had appeared in literary form, Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune (edited in 1875 by J.A.H. Murray). The Tristrem or Tristan legend forms a most valuable part of Celtic lore; it is an indispensable part of the Arthurian corpus.


THOMSON, SIR CHARLES WYVILLE (1830-82)
The modern generation may have learned much about undersea life from the remarkable career of Frenchman Jacques Cousteau, but naturalist Charles Thomson, from Bonsyde, West Lothian, was the first marine biologist to describe life in the ocean depths. Thomason studied medicine at Edinburgh, then went to Aberdeen to lecture on botany. However, after becoming chair of natural history at the Irish Universities Cork and Belfast, in the period 1853-68, he concentrated on zoology.

Thomson then returned to Scotland to head the natural history department at Edinburgh, specializing in the relatively new study of marine invertebrates. On two deep-sea dredging expeditions off the Scottish coast in 1868-9, he discovered a wide variety of invertebrate forms previously believed to have become extinct. His measurements of various sea temperatures that indicated the presence of oceanic circulation were published in The Depths of the Sea (1873). In 1872, aboard the Royal Navy ship "Challenger," Thomson began to explore the three great ocean basins, completing over 68,000 miles on his fact-finding voyage of circumnavigation that added so much to our knowledge of the mysterious oceans.


THOMSON, GEORGE (1757-1851)
With the rapid pace of the industrial revolution in late 18th century Britain and the great movement of country folk to the towns and cities, we are extremely fortunate that some people took the time to write down for posterity the wonderful folk melodies and songs that could have disappeared forever. One of these collectors was George Thomson who gathered Scottish, Irish and Welsh folk songs. In addition, he worked with some of the leading literary men of his day to supply texts and with notable composers to supply accompaniments. His circle of friends and collaborators included Robert Burns (who helped Thomson in his projected Select Scottish Airs (1793-1841), Sir Walter Scott, Peter Pindar, Joseph Hayden, Ludwig van Beethoven and many others.


THOMSON, JAMES (1700-48)
From Ednam, Roxburgh, James Thomson made his name in the English literary tradition as a leading poet. His masterpiece, composed in London, where he worked as a tutor, is the long, blank verse poem in four parts, the first sustained nature poem written in English. The Seasons, including Winter (1726), Summer (1727), Spring (1728) and Autumn (1730) in many ways, foreshadowed the attitudes of the so-called Romantic poets with their interest in nature as a benevolent deity. Thomson also praised the achievements of England's rise to commercial and maritime greatness.

The Seasons was revolutionary; it lacked the narrative device of a plot and thus completely broke from the traditions favored by the Neoclassicists. Giving expression to the achievements of Newtonian science by incorporating his belief that the scientist and the poet are both employed in explaining God's work, as revealed through nature, Thomson used vivid images to show how states of mind could be inspired in the reader. He also used the same device in his To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton (1727).


THOMSON, JAMES (1834-82)
From Port Glasgow James Thomson, using the pseudonym "Bysse Vanolis," is best remembered for a poem that expressed symbolically his revulsion at what urban growth was doing to the human spirit. Raised as an orphan and educated in a military academy, Thomson was sent as a regimental schoolmaster to Ireland in 1851. There he met and was greatly influenced by the freethinker and radical Charles Bradlaugh, the London-born free thinker and atheist and champion of individual liberties.

Back in London in 1862, Thomson began to produce essays, poems and stories, many of them published in the working man's weekly the National Reformer, published by his friend Bradlaugh. In 1874 the periodical contained "The City of Dreadful Night," the somber, imaginative work that brought Thomson fame. It describes, in pure Dickensian terms, the horrors and degradation of the English City and town in the Victorian period and thus constitutes a valuable historical document of the age.


THOMSON, JOSEPH (1858-95)
Unlike his Scottish contemporary David Livingstone, geologist, naturalist and explorer Joseph Thomson from Penpont, Dumfries, did not have his name made famous throughout Europe and North America by a Stanley, yet he was the first European to reach several regions of East Africa. But if the name of the failed missionary Livingstone became more famous, he did not have an animal such as Thompson's gazelle named after him.

Thomson first went to east central Africa in 1878 with the Royal Geographical Society, reaching the northern end of Lake Nyasa and the shores of Lake Tanganyika. He made important scientific observations on the return journey while attempting to reach the Congo during which he discovered Lake Rukwa. His next expedition, undertaken by the same Society, was to try to find the shortest route from Zanzibar to Uganda. Travelling through hostile Masai territory, the unarmed Scotsman went by way of Mt. Kilimanjaro, reaching Lake Victoria in late 1882.

Thomson later worked to secure British trading rights in present-day Nigeria and served in Empire-builder Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company. His carefully detailed writings were an outstanding contribution to geographical knowledge of east Africa. They include To the Central African Lakes and Back (1881) and Through Masai Land (1885).


TODD, ALEXANDER ROBERTUS, Baron of Trumpington (b. 1907)
Biochemist Alexander Todd was born in Glasgow. Educated at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Oxford, England, he spent some time on the staff of the prestigious Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London and at the University of London. He then became Professor of Organic Chemistry at Manchester (1938-44) and Cambridge (1944-7l).

At Manchester, Todd worked mainly on nucleosides, the compounds that form the structural units of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). In 1949 he was able to synthesize adenosine triphosphate, a related substance that is vital to the utilization of energy in living organisms. During that same year, he also synthesized the compounds, flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) and uridine triphosphate in 1954. His work greatly contributed to our understanding of the workings of genes. A year later, Todd elucidated the structure of vitamin B 12. In the meantime, he had become chairman of the British government's advisory committee on scientific policy. In 1957, Todd received the Nobel Prize for chemistry. He was created a life peer in 1962.


TWEEDDALE, JOHN HAY, 2nd Earl (1625-97)
John Tweeddale, born in Yester, East Lothian, played various roles in the Civil Wars against King Charles I. Tweeddale sided with the Covenanters at one time, with the Royalists on another and though he played a prominent role in Scottish affairs during the restoration of Charles II, he should be best remembered for his part in the attempt to establish a Scottish colony on Panama. As Lord High Chancellor of Scotland during the reign of William III, Tweeddale formally assented in 1695 to the act establishing the Darien Company. The disaster that ensued to so many Scots investors cost him his position and almost his life, and is believed by many to have hastened the union with England.


TYLER, JAMES (1747-1804)
Called "Balloon Tyler" because of his experiments in aeronautics, Tyler became one of the first persons in Britain to attempt a balloon ascent in 1794. This was not too long after the hazardous experiments of the Montgolfier brothers in France. Tyler deserves his place on our list, however, because of his work as editor of the Second edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, which he revised almost single-handedly from the original edition. He enlarged the work from three to ten volumes, adding historical and biographical material.

The debt-ridden eccentric Tyler, from Fearn, Ross and Cromerty, was forced to emigrate in 1792 for his radical political opinions expressed in a handbill he printed in Edinburgh. He came to Salem, Massachusetts, where he worked as a newspaper publisher.


URQUHART, SIR THOMAS (1611-60)
From Cromarty, Thomas Urquhart became famous for his original translation of Rabelais from French into English. Following studies at King's College, Aberdeen, Urquhart fought for King Charles I against the Covenanters in 1641 and then for Charles II ten years later. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London by Oliver Cromwell, but during parole, managed to flee to the Continent.

Urguhart tried his hand at writing poetry, but it was undistinguished and unsuccessful. His treatise on trigonometry got the same response, as did his chronology of the Urquhart's and his own personal reminiscences. He found a suitable medium for his highly eclectic, personal style of writing when he translated the imaginative, idiosyncratic Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, beginning in 1653. The work is considered a classic of translation (Urquhart was aided by a Frenchman who had settled in England), and perhaps the most vivid example of 17th century English prose. Urquhart gave Rabelais to an eager English-language reading audience.
  

Copyright ©2001 Britannia.com, LLC   Questions? Comments!   Design & Development Unica Multimedia
 
London Hotels at Discount |  Dogfacto.com |  Home & Garden  |  Knownworld Travel