Kentigern (later canonized, and known as St. Mungo) reputedly establishes a religious settlement in about 550 on the future site of Glasgow.

The University of Glasgow is established in 1451, on the model of the University of Bologna,by a charter or papal bull from Pope Nicholas V, at the suggestion of King James II, giving Bishop William Turnbull permission to add the university to the city's cathedral.

It is the second-oldest university in Scotland, and the fourth-oldest in the English-speaking world.

The deposed queen, aided by a few brave friends, escapes from her incarceration in the castle of Loch Leven and immediately rallies behind her a six thousand-man force.

The Marian loyalists on May 13, 1568, confront the army led by the Protestant lords at Langside and are soundly beaten.

Mary immediately flees Scotland for ...

Scottish Presbyterian reformer Andrew Melville, after studying at the universities of St. Andrews, Paris, and Poitiers and holding a professorship in Geneva, becomes the principal of Glasgow University in 1574, where he encourages the study of languages, science, and modern forms of philosophy and theology.

The Reformation had caused the University of Glasgow to decline until its revival by Melville, who has drawn up a new constitution for it that is confirmed in 1577.

It had become illegal AFter the Scottish Reformation in 1560 to preach, proselytize for, or otherwise endorse Catholicism.

John Ogilvie, the son of a wealthy laird, had been born into a respected Calvinist family near Keith in Banffshire, Scotland and had ben educated in mainland Europe where he attended a number of Catholic educational establishments, under the Benedictines at Regensburg in Germany and with the Jesuits at Olomouc and Brno in the present day Czech Republic.

In the midst of the religious controversies and turmoil that have engulfed the Europe of this age, he had decided to become a Catholic.

He had been received, aged seventeen, into the church at Leuven, Belgium in 1596.

He had joined the Society of Jesus in 1608 and had been ordained a priest in Paris in 1610.

After ordination, he had made repeated entreaties to be sent back to Scotland to minister to the few remaining Catholics in the Glasgow area.

He had returned to Scotland in November 1613 disguised as a soldier, and began to preach in secret, celebrating mass clandestinely in private homes.

However, his ministry was to last less than a year.

He had been betrayed in 1614 and arrested in Glasgow and taken to jail in Paisley.

He has suffered terrible tortures, including being kept awake for eight days and nine nights, in an attempt to make him divulge the identities of other Catholics.

Nonetheless, Ogilvie had not relented; consequently, after a biased trial, he is convicted of high treason for refusing to accept the King's spiritual jurisdiction.

Ogilvie, now thirty-six, is on March 10, 1615, paraded through the streets of Glasgow and hanged at Glasgow Cross.

A situation already bad for the king has gotten steadily worse in the course of the past year.

Following the advice of James, Marquess of Hamilton, he allows the General Assembly to meet at Glasgow in November, the first since that held at Perth twenty years before.

It's not absolutely certain what Hamilton, a man of limited political ability, had hoped to achieve by this move, but the outcome is contrary to all expectations.

Not only are the bishops—hunted figures rarely appearing in public now—prevented from attending, but the whole affair is so stage-managed that it is packed out with as many elders (many of them armed) as ministers.

Hamilton, having lost all control, departs.

The Assembly, now technically illegal, continues to meet until December 20.

Its proceedings show how much more radical feeling had become since the Covenant had been first signed in February.

All that James and Charles had worked for over the past forty years—the Liturgy, the Canons, the Five Articles of Perth and the Court of High Commission—is swept away.

Even more significant, Episcopacy itself is abolished and the bishops condemned and excommunicated one by one.

Presbyterianism is declared to be the one true government of the Church of Scotland.

This, it must be stressed, is a political as well as an ecclesiastical revolution, for the bishops stand condemned not just as church officials but also as officers of the crown.

The historian Leopold von Ranke is later to compare the defiance of the Glasgow Assembly to that moment, a century and a half later, when the French National Assembly resisted the commands of Louis XVI.

James Watt, in trying to understand the thermodynamics of heat and steam, carries out many laboratory experiments in 1759 and his diaries record that in conducting these he used a kettle as a boiler to generate steam.

Watt's friend, John Robison, has called his attention to the use of steam as a source of motive power in 1759.

The design of the Newcomen engine, in use for almost fifty years for pumping water from mines, has hardly changed from its first implementation. 

Watt had begun to experiment with steam, though he has never seen an operating steam engine.

He tries constructing a model; it fails to work satisfactorily, but he continues his experiments and begins to read everything he can about the subject. 

He comes to realize the importance of latent heat—the thermal energy released or absorbed during a constant-temperature process—in understanding the engine, which, unknown to Watt, his friend Joseph Black had previously discovered some years before. 

Understanding of the steam engine is in a very primitive state, for the science of thermodynamics will not be formalized for nearly another one hundred years.

Watt was born on January 19, 1736 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, a seaport on the Firth of Clyde.

His father is a shipwright, ship owner and contractor, and serves as the town's chief baillie, while his mother, Agnes Muirhead, comes from a distinguished family and is well educated.

Both are Presbyterians and strong Covenanters.

Watt's grandfather, Thomas Watt, was a mathematics teacher and baillie to the Baron of Cartsburn.

Despite being raised by religious parents, he would later on become a deist.

Watt did not attend school regularly; initially he was mostly schooled at home by his mother but later he attended Greenock Grammar School.

He exhibited great manual dexterity, engineering skills and an aptitude for mathematics, while Latin and Greek failed to interest him.

When he was eighteen, his mother died and his father's health began to fail.

Watt travelled to London to study instrument-making for a year, then returned to Scotland, settling in the major commercial city of Glasgow intent on setting up his own instrument-making business.

He made and repaired brass reflecting quadrants, parallel rulers, scales, parts for telescopes, and barometers, among other things.

Because he had not served at least seven years as an apprentice, the Glasgow Guild of Hammermen (which had jurisdiction over any artisans using hammers) blocked his application, despite there being no other mathematical instrument makers in Scotland.

Watt had been saved from this impasse by the arrival from Jamaica of astronomical instruments bequeathed by Alexander Macfarlane to the University of Glasgow, instruments that required expert attention.

Watt had restored them to working order and was remunerated.

These instruments were eventually installed in the Macfarlane Observatory.

Subsequently three professors had offered him the opportunity to set up a small workshop within the university.

It was initiated in 1757 and two of the professors, the physicist and chemist Joseph Black as well as the famed Adam Smith, have become Watt's friends.

At first he had worked on maintaining and repairing scientific instruments used in the university, helping with demonstrations, and expanding the production of quadrants.

In 1759 he forms a partnership with John Craig, an architect and businessman, to manufacture and sell a line of products including musical instruments and toys.

This partnership will last for the next six years, and employ up to sixteen workers.

Craig will die in 1765.

One employee, Alex Gardner, will eventually take over the business, which will last into the twentieth century.
 
There is a popular story that Watt was inspired to invent the steam engine by seeing a kettle boiling, the steam forcing the lid to rise and thus showing Watt the power of steam.

This story is told in many forms; in some Watt is a young lad, in others he is older, sometimes it's his mother's kettle, sometimes his aunt's.

James Watt of course did not actually invent the steam engine, as the story implies, but dramatically improved the efficiency of the existing Newcomen engine by adding a separate condenser.

This is difficult to explain to someone not familiar with concepts of heat and thermal efficiency.

It appears that the story of Watt and the kettle was created, possibly by Watt's son James Watt Jr., and persists because it is easy for children to understand and remember.

In this light it can be seen as akin to the story of Isaac Newton, the falling apple and his discovery of gravity.

Although it is often dismissed as a myth, like most good stories the story of James Watt and the kettle has a basis in fact.

Watt had been asked in 1763 to repair a model Newcomen engine belonging to the university.

Even after repair, the engine barely works.

After much experimentation, Watt demonstrates that about three-quarters of the thermal energy of the steam is being consumed in heating the engine cylinder on every cycle.

This energy is wasted because later in the cycle cold water is injected into the cylinder to condense the steam to reduce its pressure.

Thus by repeatedly heating and cooling the cylinder, the engine wastes most of its thermal energy rather than converting it into mechanical energy.

Watt's critical insight, arrived at in May 1765, is to cause the steam to condense in a separate chamber apart from the piston, and to maintain the temperature of the cylinder at the same temperature as the injected steam by surrounding it with a "steam jacket."

Thus very little energy is absorbed by the cylinder on each cycle, making more available to perform useful work.

Watt has a working model later this same year.

Despite a potentially workable design, there are still substantial difficulties in constructing a full-scale engine.

This requires more capital, some of which comes from Black.

More substantial backing comes from John Roebuck, the founder of the celebrated Carron Iron Works near Falkirk, with whom he now forms a partnership.

Roebuck lives at Kinneil House in Bo'ness, during which time Watt works at perfecting his steam engine in a cottage adjacent to the house.

The shell of the cottage, and a very large part of one of his projects, still exist to the rear.

The principal difficulty is in machining the piston and cylinder.

Iron workers of the day are more like blacksmiths than modern machinists, and are unable to produce the components with sufficient precision.

Much capital is spent in pursuing a patent on Watt's invention.

Strapped for resources, Watt is forced to take up employment—first as a surveyor, then as a civil engineer—for the next eight years.

John Mills, who had come to prominence in the 1740s, while working on the translation of Chambers's Cyclopaedia, is a person of considerable eminence in the eighteenth century, though little definite is known because no record exists of his life.

From his manner of expression, it is possible he may have lived his early life in foreign countries along time, possibly in France, but he was not born there.

In 1741 he was staying in London, where he had made preparations to go to Jamaica.

He had cancelled those plans because, as he wrote "having met with something more advantageous which engages me to stay in England", Mills married a French women, and they had two children; one baptized in Paris on April 27, 1742, and another born in May 1743.

In 1743 Mills was in Paris for the purpose of bringing out, in concert with Gottfried Sellius, a German historian, a French edition of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia; but Lebreton, the printer commissioned by him to manage the undertaking, had cheated him out of the subscription money, assaulted him, and ultimately obtained a license in his own name.

This was the origin of the famous Encyclopédie.

Mills, unable to obtain redress, had returned to England.

In 1755 Mills had started translation The History of the Roman Emperors, from Augustus to Constantine by Jean-Baptiste Louis Crévier from the French, and in 1763 Mills had continued and completed the Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, by Thomas Blackwell the younger.

In the 1760s he finds his true vocation as a writer on agriculture, which had started with his translation in 1762 of Duhamel du Monceau's Practical Treatise of Husbandry.

In 1766 he publishes an Essay on the Management of Bees.

The A New System of Practical Husbandry, (1767) treats all branches of agriculture, and contains the first mention of the potato as grown in fields.

On February 13, 1766, Mills had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society with Benjamin Franklin as one of his sponsors.

He is the first foreign associate of the French Agricultural Society, on whose list his name, with London as his residence, will appear from 1767 to 1784.

He is also member of the Royal Societies of Agriculture of Rouen, the Mannheim Academy of Sciences, and the Economical Society of Bern.