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Scots Who Made A Difference

O & P
OGILBY, JOHN (1600-76)
From Edinburgh, John Ogilby was a master of many trades. He was a dancing master and theatre owner, a scholar of Greek and Latin, a poet and translator. But for our sakes, he is remembered as a pioneer in the making of that indispensable tool for the modern traveller, the road atlas.

Despite being ridiculed by English poets and literary standard-makers John Dryden in MacFlecknoe and Alexander Pope in the Dunciad, Ogilby was put in charge of the poetic part of the coronation ceremony of Charles II by the king himself. Following the great fire that destroyed most of the city of London in 1666, Ogilby set up a printing shop, calling himself the "king's cosmographer and geographical printer." He produced many notable, illustrated volumes including Britannia...A Geographical and Historical Description of the Principal Roads thereof (1675), considered a landmark in accurate road description.


OLIPHANT, MARGARET OLIPHANT (1828-1897)
Prolific novelist, historical writer and biographer Margaret Oliphant came from Wallyford, Midlothian. She is best known for her portraits of small-town life and her depiction of local characters in Chronicles of Carlingford (1863-66), Miss Marjoribanks (1866) and Salem Chapel (1863). A struggling widow with a large family to support, she published more than 100 separate books, including children's books, biographies and historical studies. Important to literary historians is Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and his Sons (1897), the distinguished Edinburgh firm founded in 1807.


ORCHARDSON, SIR WILLIAM QUILLER (1832-1910)
Distinguished Scottish painter William Orchardson, born in Edinburgh, was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1877. He specialized in portraits and paintings of historical and domestic genre. He evolved a highly personal style that well utilized golden tones in the two of his paintings that now grace the walls of the prestigious Tate Gallery in London: "Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon" (1880) and "Her Mother's Voice" (1888). The last one is surely the inspiration for one of the most widely-known and successful advertising icons in the world, the little dog listening to the gramaphone and to "His Master's Voice" (now owned by RCA).


ORR, JOHN BOYD, 1st Baron (1880-1971)
The Nobel Peace Prize for 1949 was awarded to Ayrshire-born John Boyd Orr, scientist and world authority on nutrition. Becoming director of the Institute of Animal Nutrition at Aberdeen University in 1914, Orr founded the Imperial Bureau of Animal Nutrition in that city in 1929. He became known worldwide with the publication of his book Food, Health and Income (1936), a report of dietary survey by income groups. This influential book, showing that a great deal of the British population lacked the income to afford a proper diet, helped create the country's fair food rationing policies of World War II.

After the Second World War, Boyd Orr became rector of the University of Glasgow, an MP for the Scottish Universities and Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. His many publications helped formulate much of the UN's policies regarding diet and nutrition, especially in the emerging nations of Africa.


PARK, MUNGO (1771-1806)
Born at Fowlshields, near Falkirk, Mungo Park died in what is now Nigeria. His service on ships engaged in the East India trade enabled the surgeon-trained Scot to study and report on the plant and animal life of Sumatra. He was then asked by the African Association to look for the source of the River Niger, a task, which he began in 1795. Entering unknown territory and severely handicapped by rampant fever and other hardships, including imprisonment by an Arab chief for a number of months before making his escape, Park covered over 200 miles with little more than a horse and a compass.

After reaching Segou, on the Niger (now in Mali), and forced to travel on foot, Park retraced his steps. After suffering a bout of fever, which nearly finished him off, he was assisted by a slave trader and reached Pisania in 1797. He returned to Scotland to practice medicine at Peebles, but was then asked to lead a second expedition to the Niger. This time his party of 40 was reduced to 11 by disease but managed to charter much previously unexplored territory. Park and his final eight companions were never able to return to the coast. News reached Scotland via the British settlement on The Gambia that the little group had been attacked by natives and Park had been drowned.


PATERSON, WILLAIM (1658-1719)
Scots worldwide have a reputation for frugality and a propensity to save. Perhaps it all started with Tenwald, Dumfries-born William Paterson, writer on economic issues, main backer of the disastrous scheme to settle Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, and founder of the Bank of England. (Paterson accompanied the 1698 expedition to Darien, losing much of his financial investment in the ill-considered scheme.)

As a successful London merchant, with experience gained from travel in Europe and the West Indies, Paterson organized the Bank of England in 1694, fulfilling the long-desired hopes of his fellow London merchants. After Darien, where his wife and child died and he himself was taken gravely ill, he tried unsuccessfully to organize further expeditions. There were no takers. He also advocated the union of Scotland and England, seeing economic benefits for both nations. His influence remained strong, and in 1701 he recommended that the government employ the sinking-fund method of retiring the national debt, having deposits regularly put into a special fund for this purpose. The scheme came to fruition in 1816 when Prime Minister Robert Walpole's sinking fund was established.


PHILIP, JOHN (1775-1851)
Missionary John Philip came from Kirkcaldy in Fife. Like so many of his compatriots, he died overseas in South Africa. He is best known for championing the rights of native Africans against the intransigent, arrogant, racist European settlers, busy dispossessing the natives of their ancestral homelands.

A minister at Aberdeen, Philip was asked to go to Africa by the London Missionary Society in 1818. Off he went to investigate conditions at his Church's various missions in that country. What he found caused him to severely condemn the attitudes and practices of the white minority colonists, especially in their treatment of the defenseless Hottentots, for whom he devoted the rest of his life to try to secure better treatment.

Naturally, Philip's work and his views were resented by the European settlers, who saw him as an interfering "do-gooder," however, they found a ready audience at home in Britain. He returned to Britain in 1826 to lecture and published Researches in South Africa (1828). One of his influential friends was William Wilberforce, the main force behind the British Empire's abolition of the slave trade. Together, they managed to get the government to enact an ordinance that gave equal rights to all natives in South Africa in 1828. Unfortunately, the increasing demands of colonial expansion prevented Philip's hope of creating a series of native states separate from Cape Colony.


PHYFE, DUNCAN (1768-1854)
Though he was born near Loch Fannich, Ross and Cromarty, Duncan Phyfe achieved fame in New York City, where his furniture designs had a lasting influence in the United States and where he achieved his reputation as perhaps the greatest of all American cabinetmakers. After emigrating in his teens and serving his apprenticeship at Albany, he moved to New York City in 1792. His skills led to such a demand for his products that he eventually employed over 100 carvers and cabinetmakers. It was no longer necessary for the colonists to send to England for quality furniture.

After the Revolution, Phyfe's workshops were the equal of any in the world. By 1825, taste dictated that he change his production from the Sheraton, Regency and French Directoire styles to what is known as the Empire style. Strongly influenced by the great work of fellow-Scot Robert Adam, Phyfe satisfied the tastes of wealthy New Yorkers in a rapidly growing metropolis, especially the particular needs of multi-millionaire and highly influential John Jacob Astor. Phyfe himself became extremely wealthy.


PLAYFAIR, JOHN (1748-1819)
Born in what is now Angus, John Playfair, a geologist and mathematician, made many valuable contributions to our study of the earth's features. His work helped explain uniformitarianism (see Hutton and Lyell, above) which proposed that the earth's features generally represent a response to former processes that are similar in kind to present processes. The idea may see elementary now, but Playfair was the first scientist to propose that a river cuts in its own valley. He was also the first to attribute the transportation of stray masses of rocks to the action of glaciers. Playfair's three pioneering studies are Elements of Geometry (1795); Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802); and Outlines of Natural Philosophy (1812-16).


PORTER, EDWIN S. (1869-1941)
Born in Scotland and emigrating to United States as a young sailor, Edwin Stratton Porter, as film director, revolutionized movie making. Porter learned his craft as an apprentice at the workshops of Thomas Edison in New Jersey. He introduced the technique of dramatic editing, by which pieces of scenes shot at different times and places are pieced together to form a single unit. It is difficult to see how modern films could be made without use of this technique. It was first successfully tried out in 1903 to produce the first American documentary, The Life of an American Fireman.

After directing the most successful and influential of the early story films, The Great Train Robbery in 1903, Porter was firmly established as a leader in the industry. The movie not only helped standardize the length of the US film, set the pattern for the Western and used the first close-up it also provided the general criteria for film editing and camera placement. In 1917, Porter gave the later-to-be famous director D.W. Griffith his first acting role. The last film Porter directed was The Eternal City in 1915. By that time, the movie industry was well on its way to its position as the foremost entertainment media and perhaps the most influential in history.


PRINGLE, SIR JOHN (1707-1782)
Sir John Pringle's work in the cause of disease earned him the title of the father of modern military medicine. Indeed, Pringle's suggestion, based on experience as a physician in the armed services, that military hospitals be treated as sanctuaries mutually protected by belligerents on both sides eventually led to the establishment of the Red Cross in 1864.

From Stitchel, Roxburgh, Pringle studied anatomy at Leiden, in the Netherlands. Graduating as M.D. in 1730, he then lectured at Edinburgh University before serving as personal physician to the Earl of Stair, Commander of British forces in Europe. This, in turn, led to his appointment as Surgeon General of the British forces in the Netherlands during the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48). He then became physician to the Duke of Cumberland in 1749 and King George III in 1774.

Pringle's studies as army physician convinced him of the role of ordinary putrefactive processes in the disease-forming process and he was able to apply his theories into practices in army camps and hospitals. His Observations on the Diseases of the Army (1752) revolutionized military medicine. In it he outlined procedures for remedying poor hospital ventilation and camp sanitation, drew up rules for improving camp hygiene through proper drainage, adequate latrines and the proper siting of the hospital facilities away from marshes or poorly drained land.

Pringle's other influential work was Observations on the Nature and Cure of Hospital and Jayl Fevers (1750). He recognized that various forms of the all-too common dysentery were a single disease and that hospital and jail fevers could be equated as typhus. He was the first to use the term "influenza," a word of his own coinage.


PRINGLE, THOMAS (1789-1834)
Thomas Pringle, from Blaiklaw, Roxburgh has been called the father of South African poetry. A graduate of Edinburgh University, he emigrated to South Africa in 1820. At Cape Town (then part of a British colony), Pringle published a magazine and a newspaper, but they were suppressed by the government because of his views on reform. Returning to Britain, he settled in London, where he then spent the rest of his life in the anti-slavery movement.

Pringle's poems, in which he wrote of the natives of South Africa, the wildlife and the landscape, were published in Ephemerides (1828) and African Sketches (1834). He also published his autobiography, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (1835).
  

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