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Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

  • James Clerk MaxwellJames Clerk Maxwell was three years old, and one phrase was never out of his mouth: "what's the go o' that?" His mother recorded it in 1834, describing a boy…
  • Walter ScottWalter Scott was born on the 15th of August 1771 in a third-floor apartment on College Wynd, a narrow alleyway in Edinburgh's Old Town, leading from the…
  • Adam SmithAdam Smith took Charles Townshend on a tour of a tanning factory, and while discussing free trade, he walked straight into a huge tanning pit.
  • Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem.
  • James Watt"I can think of nothing else but this machine." Those words belong to James Watt, the Scottish inventor, engineer and chemist born in Greenock on the 19th of…
  • Marc Isambard BrunelMarc Isambard Brunel arrived into the world on the 25th of April 1769. He was born on a family farm in Hacqueville, Normandy.
  • Angus DeatonAngus Deaton was born on the 19th of October 1945 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he grew up to become one of the economists whose work most fundamentally…
  • Matthew BoultonMatthew Boulton stood at the furnace of the modern world. Born in Birmingham on the 3rd of September 1728, he spent his life turning that city into something…
  • Max BornMax Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for work he had completed nearly three decades earlier. The delay was not an oversight.
  • Thomas TelfordThomas Telford was born on the 9th of August 1757 on a hill farm called Glendinning, three miles east of Eskdalemuir Kirk in the rural parish of Westerkirk…
  • Linus PaulingLinus Carl Pauling stands alone in the history of Nobel Prizes. He is the only person ever to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry…