AJ Morton

IT’S still difficult to believe an anonymous 18th century Scot from Renfrewshire, identified only as “CM”, was already working on his own functional electrostatic messaging system (a true forerunner of electronic mail) in 1753 – less than a decade after the last Jacobite rebellion (1745), almost 50 years before the invention of the Voltaic Pile (1799), and almost a century before the first Electric Telegraph Company was formed (1845).

WILLIAM Wallace governed as Regent (“Guardian” in medieval Scotland) for one year (1297-98) between the reigns of John Balliol and Robert the Bruce. It’s not sensible to mistake a nation’s Regent or Guardian for a career criminal, yet we continue to deploy these propagandist terms when describing Wallace, a man about whom we know next to nothing beyond the fact he was Regent years before Bruce was King.