Scottish Inventors and Innovation...
Scottish Inventors and Innovations: The Small Country That Changed Everything
Everything Scotland by Lesley Kennedy
S2 · E2
Sep 3, 2026
29:37
Episode notes

Scotland has a population of around five million people. It has also given the world the telephone, the television, radar, the MRI scanner, penicillin, insulin, anaesthesia, the hypodermic needle, ultrasound scanning, the refrigerator, the vacuum flask, the toaster, the raincoat, the pneumatic tyre, the bicycle, the flushing toilet, colour photography, universal standard time, and Dolly the sheep. Among other things. Lesley Kennedy goes through all of it in this episode, including the ones you almost certainly did not know were Scottish and the ones that are going to make you look at your kitchen, your bathroom, and your wallet rather differently.

Also in this episode: why Fleming's untidy laboratory was essential to the discovery of penicillin; why John Logie Baird introduced the television using a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill; ... 

Keywords
Scottish inventions
Scottish inventors
Did Scotland invent the telephone
Did Scotland invent the flushing toilet
Dolly the sheep Scotland