Historian Christian Lous Lange said that ‘Technology is a useful servant and a dangerous master’. Technology certainly has taken over our lives. Since the start of the twentieth century the pace of change has accelerated until the story of one of Scotland’s greatest icons, the Loch Ness Monster, has been invaded by Internet technology.
Our favourite description of a computer was given by a young girl who described it as a ‘sort of television that Daddy swears at’. In our experience they require a lot of swearing, not just when they fail to co-operate, but also when they invade our privacy and presume to tell us where we want to go, what we want to eat, what we want to wear. Yet without e-mails, search engines, online archives and even online bookshops, how would we manage?
Perhaps the single most invasive and persuasive invention of all is the television. Every evening 20 million people in the UK sit down to watch telly. It’s hard to imagine life without it. A generation has grown up with it as a daily companion. In a project which explored the deprivation suffered by children throughout the twentieth century, including two wars, the revelation that shocked twenty-first century-school kids more than any other was that in the past you had to get up out of your seat and walk across the room and turn a knob to change channels on the television.
The invention was, of course, Scottish.
It is well known that the television was invented by Scotsman John Logie Baird from Helensburgh. It was not his only invention or business venture. He had a varied and often strange early career. This included a project which smacks of medieval alchemy.
He hated school. His interest in science and technology was already showing itself at an early age. While at school he took an early leap into aviation, a subject still in its infancy. He constructed a glider. When it was launched accidentally while he was working on it, it flew about as well as the Birdman of Stirling. He left flight to the Wright Brothers.
He tried to brighten the family home in Helensburgh by installing electricity, the only house in the town to have the technology. The system was somewhat temperamental and needed constant monitoring. One evening the system blacked out when his father was halfway down the stairs. He tumbled to the bottom. The power had to go.
If it was not to be power supply, what about communication? He built a telephone network extending to nearby friends. The telephone wires did not have telegraph posts to support them so he improvised by stringing the wires between nearby trees. On a dark and stormy night the wires were jostled from the branches. The sagging cable swept the driver of a horse-drawn cab off his vehicle. The telecommunication empire was over before it started.
In 1903 he made himself unpopular by experimenting with selenium, which stank the house out. His selenium cell was, however, a first step towards television. By 1912, while at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow (now the University of Strathclyde), he had seriously begun experimenting with this technology.
In 1916 he was declared unfit for military service, but was aware of the appalling conditions in the trenches. He set out to provide at least one area of comfort for the troops and created the ‘Baird Undersock Company’. His socks, treated with Borax, were intended to combat the constant problem of foot infection at the front. He was himself a sufferer of cold feet (as am I). He used innovative sales techniques, employing sandwich board women (rather than men) for the first time. He also sent friends to ask for Baird Undersocks in shops which he knew didn’t stock them.
Around 1918 he was working for the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company and came up with a plan that recalls the Philosopher’s Stone: the Holy Grail for medieval alchemists – the power to turn base metal into gold. Baird’s plan was to turn dust into diamonds. The scheme would require electricity – a lot of it.
In his own words, from his autobiography Sermons, Soap and Television:
Diamonds are created in nature by subjecting carbon to a very high pressure and a very high temperature. I thought I might get these conditions artificially by electrically exploding a rod of carbon embedded in concrete. I … embedded the whole thing in a large iron pot. My idea was to pass a stupendous sudden current through the carbon so as to generate enormous heat and pressure. I chose a good time and then, when no-one was about, closed the switch. There was a dull thud from the pot, a cloud of smoke, and then the main current breaker tripped and the whole of the power supply went off … I forgot about the pot and it disappeared. Perhaps it is today lying in some forgotten rubbish heap, a pot of cement with priceless diamonds embedded in it.’
He had blacked out half of Glasgow!
By the way, his scheme is not as crazy as it sounds and he was not the only person working on diamond manufacture, but it was not until 1953 that this was reliably achieved.
Having actually made some money from the socks, he took himself to Trinidad to start a new venture. In hardly a logical step from making socks he started making jam. He failed to take into account the local wildlife:
Sweet smelling clouds of vapour rose from the pot and floated into the jungle. They acted like a trumpet call to the insect life and a mass of insects of all shapes and sizes appeared out of the bush in terrifying numbers. They flew into the steam above the cauldron in their thousands and, scorched, fell lifeless into the boiling jam. I dropped my stirrer and ran …
By 1920 he was back in London; the jam wasn’t selling well so he took the next logical step – soap.
It was very cheap at 18s per hundredweight, but it was also very poor. There were complaints.
In Sermons, Soap and Television Baird tells the story:
One day a very vulgar and ferociously angry woman banged her way into the office. She carried a small infant, pulled its clothes over its head and thrust a raw and inflamed posterior into my face. The poor child looked like a boiled lobster. The wretched woman had washed the infant in a strong solution of Baird’s Speedy Cleaner. I calmed her down and pointed out that the Speedy Cleaner was a powerful scouring soap for floors and ship decks, and not a toilet soap for infants.
Further ventures followed, including glass razor blades and pneumatic shoes. The pneumatic shoes involved taking fellow Scots inventor Robert Thomson’s tyre idea to a new level. He inserted balloons into large boots, but on his first experimental stroll or, more accurately, a ‘succession of drunken and uncontrollable lurches’, one of his balloons burst, to the amusement of local urchins who had been following him.
He finally decided to concentrate on television and started making some progress, though he nearly electrocuted himself in the process. His attempts to convince others of the importance of his work did not always go well.
An attempt to convince a Daily Express editor ended in the man leaving the room and sending in a burly assistant. Apparently the conversation had gone, ‘For God’s sake, Jackson, go down to the reception room and get rid of a lunatic who is there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless. Watch him carefully, he may have a razor hidden.’
Baird persevered. By 1924 he managed to transmit a flickering image across a few feet. On 26 January 1926 he gave the world’s first demonstration of true television before fifty scientists in an attic room in central London. In 1927 his television was demonstrated over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow, and he formed the Baird Television Development Company. In 1928 the company achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in the mid-Atlantic. He also gave the first demonstration of both colour and stereoscopic television.
Inventor and businessman John Logie Baird had finally made his mark.
Sometimes the technology is flawed. In January 1918 an incident took place in the Firth of Forth which came to be known (in spite of attempts to keep the whole thing secret) as the Battle of the May Isle. This is a misnomer. No enemy vessels, equipment or personnel were involved. Not a shot was fired. It was not a battle; it was a fiasco.
Naval command decided to carry out an operation called ‘ECI’ involving two separate flotillas sailing out from Rosyth in Fife. The operation included battleships, cruisers and destroyers as well as nine K-class submarines.
Submarines were a relatively new concept and their capabilities and their role in warfare were still being explored. The automotive torpedo, designed by the Scot Robert Whitehead, was not yet in operation. The K-class was steam-powered (they had to be big, 320ft, to accommodate boilers and stocks of coal). They were notoriously complicated and difficult to handle. Six out of eighteen foundered in accidents and only one ever made contact with the enemy. They were nicknamed Kalamity class.
Because of potential German U-boat activity, the whole fleet were to sail without lights and to maintain radio silence. Then the fog came down.
The first flotilla was at sea, east of the Isle of May, followed by the subs. K11 spotted several small minesweepers coming out of Anstruther and turned to port, as did K17. K14 didn’t realise what was happening until the last minute, and the captain engaged full rudder to avoid a collision. The rudder jammed, so the sub just kept on turning, taking him straight into the path of K22, which was going full ahead. K22 slammed straight into K14. The two vessels were stuck together and immobile, still right in the path of oncoming vessels.
Orders were forgotten, lights switched on and radio pleas for help broadcast. Three battlecruisers sailed safely past, but HMS Inflexible struck K22, riding over her, pushing her under, causing considerable damage.
The Mayday (m’aidez) was picked up. Some boats in the first flotilla turned to give assistance, putting them on a collision course with the second flotilla. The captain of the leading ship of the second group, reckoning he was clear of the wrecked submarines, sped up, unaware of the returning vessels. The two fleets met head on. HMS Fearless sliced into K17. She sank within eight minutes.
K3 and K4 turned to pick up survivors. K12 turned back to help, narrowly missing a cruiser. Her unexpected appearance caused K6, newly arrived on the scene, to swerve to avoid a collision, resulting in driving straight into K4, almost cutting her in half. K4 went down with no survivors.
K7 was now picking up survivors but wash from the oncoming ships swept survivors and rescuers into the water. Many men in the water were driven under by the second flotilla speeding over them.
The operation ended with over 100 lives lost. Two K-class subs were lost and three more were badly damaged. The inadequacies of the design were spectacularly and tragically demonstrated. Astoundingly the navy went on to order six more of them, although, with the end of the war, only one was ever completed.
The Southern Necropolis in Glasgow is a spooky enough place, but imagine what it was like for police officer Alex Deeprose when, in 1954, he turned up to investigate a disturbance in the graveyard. The place was filled with children armed with bread knives and sharpened sticks. They were searching for a vampire!
The vampire, so the rumour had gone, was 7ft tall and had iron teeth for the shredding of small children. He had consumed two already!
The local children, inflamed by the story, had taken it upon themselves to seek out the monster. However, it is said that when a figure, backlit by the red light and smoke from the nearby steelworks, did appear, the children scattered.
In spite of assurances by the police and the local headmaster that no children had been reported missing in the previous months, the young ‘Van Helsings’ continued to turn up at dark for several nights, still seeking the ‘Iron Man’. When the story was reported in the newspapers adults started to turn up as well, seeking a glimpse of the gory creature.
UFO sightings in the small town of Bonnybridge and the surrounding area, stretching from Stirling to the outskirts of Edinburgh and known as the Falkirk Triangle, are a fairly recent phenomena. They are, however, numerous, totalling around 300 sightings annually. Local councillor Billy Buchanan claims that nearly half the residents of the town have seen a UFO.
It all started in 1992 when James Walker noticed some strange lights in the sky while driving home. At first he thought they were stars but was startled when he saw them move and assume a triangle shape. More sightings quickly followed. When councillor Buchanan publicly broadcast the story to a media fanfare, the number of reports accelerated. The councillor contacted the government and, particularly, the Ministry of Defence, asking for an investigation. Could there be a rational explanation for all this activity? No answers have been forthcoming.
Most of the sightings happen at night and generally consist of lights in the sky which change shape, colour and brightness, or of several lights in formation. In recent years more and more of the sightings have been caught on video. Numerous examples can be viewed on You Tube, so you can judge for yourself.
There are plans to take advantage of the area’s extra-terrestrials in attracting visitors to the town. A UFO tourist information centre is being discussed and there are discussions underway which may lead to Bonnybridge twinning with Roswell in New Mexico – the site of a famous alien landing in 1947. Roswell is quiet UFO-wise these days, but Bonnybridge is buzzing.
While Bonnybridge’s UFO activity started in 1992, we can go back to 1979 to find an astounding series of events. In Livingston, not far as the spaceship flies, an alien encounter was the subject of a police investigation.
Bob Taylor, a forest worker, returned from walking his dog on nearby Dechmont Law. He looked like he had been beaten up. He was dishevelled, his clothes torn, and he had grazes to his chin and thighs. The police agreed that an assault had taken place and set out to pursue the matter. The strange thing is that Taylor claimed he’d encountered a ‘flying dome’ which tried to pull him aboard. This is the only time a police force has investigated an attempted alien abduction.
Taylor claimed the ‘flying dome’ had been hovering in a forest clearing. The dome was about 20ft in diameter and ‘a dark metallic material with a rough texture like sandpaper’, and was ‘set with small propellers’. Smaller spheres, similar to sea mines, grabbed him and started hauling him towards the main craft. He passed out and when he awoke they were gone. His car wouldn’t start so he walked home.
Police accompanied Taylor to the site where he claimed he received his injuries. They found ‘ladder-shaped marks’ in the ground where Taylor said he saw the large spherical object and other marks that Taylor said were made by the smaller, mine-like objects.
Needless to say, UFO enthusiasts were delighted with the incident and happy to go along with Taylor’s story. Malcolm Robinson, a founder member of Strange Phenomena Investigations (SPI) to this day believes it could be one of the few genuine cases of a UFO encounter. He said, ‘About 95 per cent of UFO sightings have a natural solution but it’s the 5 per cent minority that we are trying to provide answers for’. Robinson was among the first on the scene: ‘I was there the following day. I saw the marks and I met Bob, who struck me as a very sane and rational gentleman who didn’t want any of the publicity he had been thrust into. He never changed his story.’
The incident was re-examined in 2012 in the documentary ‘UFOs – the Untold Story’, made for the National Geographic Channel. UFO sceptics remain sceptical. No one was charged with the offence, however the police file is not closed.
In 2013 the press reported that the Loch Ness Monster had disappeared. In the Inverness Courier, Gary Campbell, Registrar of Sightings for the Official Loch Ness Monster Club, said, ‘It’s very upsetting news and we don’t know where she’s gone. The number of sightings has been reducing since the turn of the century but this is the first time in almost 90 years that Nessie wasn’t seen at all’. Mr Campbell revealed that there had been no reports for eighteen months.
Three potential sightings were dismissed as images of a wave, a duck and a picture not even taken on Loch Ness. Bookmaker William Hill accordingly failed to pay out the £1,000 prize for the best Nessie sighting for 2013.
So what had happened to the beloved beast? Predictably, global warming has been blamed. In 2008, veteran Nessie hunter Robert Rines of the US-based ‘Academy of Applied Science’ stated that global warming was affecting Nessie’s habitat and could kill her off. Rines took the famous ‘flipper’ photo of Nessie in the early 1970s.
Steve Feltham, who has watched the loch for twenty-four years, reported in The Mirror that he has finally come to the conclusion that Nessie is not an ancient plesiosaur, but a catfish. Wels catfish introduced into Spanish rivers have grown to monstrous sizes, up to 13ft, and could be mistaken for the sinuous neck of a monster. These fish were introduced into a few British waters in Victorian times. If, as Mr Feltham suggests, they were put in the loch at the end of the nineteenth century, it would explain why modern monster sightings started in the 1930s. It would have taken that time for the catfish to reach a sufficiently monstrous size. If the population was not breeding successfully the population would now be dying out. Perhaps only one or two are left.
Most bizarrely, The Scotsman reported that Kevin Carlyon had taken personal responsibility for Nessie’s disappearance. Mr Carlyon is the ‘High Priest of White Witches’ in the UK. He said, ‘I personally believe Nessie is the ghost of a dinosaur, who has been regularly seen on the loch. But the spirit of the creature has been so exploited in recent years I decided to carry out an exorcism, hence no sightings of the monster’. Fortunately he did promise to return in 2014 and reverse the spell.
Ironically 2013 was the 80th anniversary of the first modern-day sighting of Nessie. She had been spotted by fishermen a few years earlier, but it was the 1933 sighting by Mr and Mrs MacKay of Drumnadrochit, reported in the Inverness Courier, that really kicked off Nessiemania. Between the sightings by St Columba in the sixth century and those by the McKays in the twentieth, Nessie was fairly quiet.
Since the 1930s the monster has been spotted over 1,000 times and photographed many times. Dr Robert Wilson’s 1934 snap effectively became the model for Nessie and all the millions of pounds worth of pictures, models and cuddly toys which have been sold to tourists. It took the good doctor sixty years to admit that he had faked the picture with a toy from Woolworths.
Nowadays most people have a camera on their phones with them at all times, so when she does put in an appearance there is a better chance than ever of getting a picture.
In 2014 technology did indeed come to the aid of the Nessie mystery. A strange object was spotted on an image of Loch Ness taken by satellite and published on Apple’s Map App. Zooming in on the image appears to show a giant catfish-like creature swimming just below the surface. An array of debunkers protested that the image was simply a boat and the wake pattern it was making. There were even suggestions that the image had been digitally tampered with.
Spurred by the Apple discovery, Bjarne Sjöstrand of Stockholm searched Google Earth and located a similarly vague image. Incredibly, it won him the 2014 William Hill prize.
In 2015, not to be outdone by Apple, Google took the mapping of Loch Ness to a new level. They brought their technology to the loch and recorded it intensively. They have transformed their ‘Street View’ facility to a ‘Loch View’, both above and below the surface. There is even a little Nessie icon to guide visitors around – a whole new way to explore the largest body of freshwater in Scotland, containing more water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined.
In addition to the IT companies’ input there were three sightings in 2014, and, up to the time of writing, four in 2015.
So does the Loch Ness Monster exist? As to the existence of a living breathing animal we’d rather not comment, but we can assure you that the Nessie legend, the Nessie mystery and the Nessie industry (worth £25 million per year) are all alive and well.
So we end with an old story (not the oldest, but at 1,400 years, pretty old) which is still evolving and growing today. Likewise Scottish history is growing and evolving (the big question being the future of our union with England). That evolution depends on everything that has happened in the past. How can we know where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been?
All this book claims to present are ‘tasters’ from the huge length and breadth of Scottish history. There is so much more to all of it. If any of the stories inspire the reader to delve a bit deeper and discover a little more then we will have done our job.