Inventions are often named after their inventor; you can probably picture the invention of James Dyson, Léon Theremin, Dr Klaus Märtens, Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and Charles Macintosh. Macintosh and his work is the feature of this episode of Glasgow’s science.

Although now famed as the inventor of the waterproof coat, his career began with him hiring squads to purchase the urine of Glaswegians - his family’s firm required a supply of ammonia. To ensure the chemical was not watered down the urine had to be tested using hydrometers.

But it was Macintosh’s potent mix of scientific knowledge and entrepreneurial talent that led to him to discover many new chemical processes. During the distillation of tar, he produced a solvent that could dissolve a material that was of limited use at the time: rubber.

Hungry for a commercial application, he made a sandwich of the rubber/solvent mix within two layers of fabric. Once the solvent had evaporated, Macintosh found the cloth did not allow water to penetrate its fibres - he had created waterproof fabric. Macintosh went on to create the garment which bears his name and patented it in 1823.
 

A pregnant woman’s first glimpse of her baby in the womb is during a routine ultrasound scan. But first a layer of thick gel is applied to her midriff. The scanner works by bouncing sound waves off the different layers of tissue and bone in a person’s body, and without the gel to transmit the sound waves between the scanner and the body the detector would simply view the patient’s skin.

The use of ultrasound technology in medicine was pioneered in Glasgow, by Ian Donald during the 1950s. He had seen radar and sonar being used during the Second World War, and after the war he took up a position at the University of Glasgow. He soon took some tumours to a Clyde shipyard where ultrasound scanners were used to detect flaws in metalwork, and found the technique also worked with human tissue.

At first his system was ridiculed but he knew ultrasound would be useful in situations where X rays could not be used, such as during pregnancy. And after perfecting his scanner, he successfully diagnosed an ovarian cyst, saving the woman’s life. Soon the ultrasound scanner became an invaluable diagnostic tool.

The periodic table is an icon of science. Posters of it can be found in science classrooms and you can buy periodic table t-shirts, mugs, shoes and even skateboards. As an idea the periodic table is incredibly useful: it catalogues all 118 known elements, of which almost everything you care to mention is made from, but it also arranges the elements to show trends. So moving from left to right will take you from the most reactive elements like hydrogen to unreactive elements like helium, useful to know when filling airships.

The table has often had gaps where elements had not yet been discovered. Characteristics of these missing elements could be predicted and experiments carried out to find them. In 1894 William Ramsay, a scientist born and raised in Glasgow, not only discovered a new element but the first of several which would require an entirely new column at the right of the periodic table, the noble gases.

Ramsay first discovered argon, a gas in our atmosphere that was previously unknown due to its lack of reactivity. And while trying to find other sources of argon, he stumbled upon helium. Ramsay placed these new elements in the periodic table and deduced that there were more elements in the new column and went on to discover neon, krypton and xenon.

We live in the Information Age: we can freely share information around the world. Yet in the nineteenth century, communication across the Atlantic Ocean was slow. Sending mail by ship was the quickest solution until a project sought to link the Old and New World by telegraph.

The man spearheading the project, Cyrus West Field, aimed to lay an immense copper cable across the ocean. After several failed attempts, the transatlantic cable was completed in 1858. But soon the morse code signals became fuzzy. In desperation, Field tried increasing the electric current but this damaged the cable beyond repair.

It seems Field had ignored advice from the greatest physicist of the day: William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, a professor at the University of Glasgow. Thomson understood that increasing the voltage would not help as the batteries were not emptying electrons into the cable, but only sending a force field that travelled along the electrons already in the copper cable. Too large a force field would cause it to interact with the iron casing of the cable and the message would be lost at sea. Thomson solved the problem by using smaller voltages with sensitive equipment and, as soon as the cable was replaced, messages could be passed between the continents within minutes instead of weeks.

Here’s a surprising fact: During the second World War, the nation’s health actually improved. This was because of changes in the quality and distribution of food, triggered in part by a nutritional scientist, John Boyd Orr.

When Boyd Orr moved to Glasgow after growing up in Ayrshire he was shocked at the poverty of the slums, where rickets and malnutrition were commonplace. He dedicated the rest of his life to reducing malnutrition, and one of his initiatives was to carry out an experiment involving school children from several cities, including Glasgow. He hoped to show that cow’s milk has important nutritional benefits for children.

The children were split into three groups. Each day, one of the groups was given whole milk, one given skimmed milk, and the other given biscuits of the same calorie value as the milk. After only seven months, Boyd Orr found a marked improvement in the health and growth rate of the children drinking milk compared to the biscuit group.

Thanks to Boyd Orr’s work, Parliament then passed a Bill which enabled schools to provide children with cheap or free milk. The policy continues to this day, and is just one of the many changes Boyd Orr achieved to improve the nation’s health.

Visit a hospital today and you’ll be asked to use alcohol hand gel before and after entering the ward. In 19th century Glasgow though it wasn’t common practice even for surgeons to wash their hands.

So, when Joseph Lister took up the position of surgeon at the Royal Infirmary, he found that almost half of the amputation cases later died from sepsis. Lister worked to change this by adjusting the methods of surgery to be anti-septic.

Sepsis occurs when the wound is infected, and at the time killed many survivors of successful operations. Building on others’ work, Lister realised microorganisms were to blame and that they could be stopped with a chemical solution. When he soaked wound dressings in carbolic acid the chances of surviving surgery increased dramatically. His work was so successful, an antiseptic mouthwash was named after him: Listerine.

The birth of antiseptic surgery is just one the stories of science that has taken place in Glasgow and is a reminder of the value of inspiring the next generation of scientists.