One of the great voyages of history was made by Commander Frank Worsley, going with Shackleton to South Georgia in a small boat to seek help for their fellow crew members, stranded on Elephant Island. Frank Worsley knew Orkney well [...]
Three men are recognised as the pioneers of the LIGO system for detecting gravitational waves, one of the greatest physics discoveries of all time. And it turns out that one of them has Orkney ancestry – as Patricia Long reports. [...]
Balfour Stewart (1828-1887) was born in Edinburgh but his father was a younger son of the Stewarts of Brugh in Westray and his mother was a daughter of William Clouston, minister of Stromness and Sandwick. Stewart spent two years at [...]
It used to be said that Orkney’s two main exports were eggs and professors. Our annual egg production peaked in 1957 at 78 million; our per capita production of professors is almost as noteworthy. Scientists almost to a man, they [...]
Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first American writer to be famous outside America. His two most successful books, Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York 1809 and The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon 1819 are not well known now but their effect [...]
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