Changing the world since 1451

The University of Glasgow Main Building from Kelvingrove Park at sunset

World-changing Glasgow. Our people have always been at the forefront of innovation. Our past achievements inspire our current world-changers.

1776Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations

1848Lord Kelvin proposes an absolute scale of temperature, now called the Kelvin Scale

1867Joseph Lister publishes research on the use of antiseptic in surgery

1879 – first successful removal of a brain tumour by William Macewen

1895Sir William Ramsay discovers helium

1896John Macintyre opens the world’s first x-ray department

1898Sir William Ramsay discovers neon, krypton and xenon

1913Frederick Soddy discovers isotopes

1926John Logie Baird invents television

1936John Boyd Orr publishes link between poverty, poor diet and ill health

1958Ian Donald shows the world the first ultrasound image of a foetus

1958 – discovery of first beta-blocking drug to treat coronary heart disease by Sir James Black

1967Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers radio pulsars

1974Graham Teasdale and Bryan Jennett create the Glasgow Coma Scale

1995James Shepherd leads a landmark study on use of statins to prevent heart attacks

2009 – A team of Glasgow researchers, led by Christian Kay, publishes the world’s first Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

2010Keith Muir leads the first fully regulated clinical trial of stem cell therapy for stroke patients

2015Sheila Rowan leads the Glasgow team that first detected gravitational waves