April 16 in Scottish History

On 16 April 1746, the Jacobite army was defeated by Hanoverian forces in the Battle of Culloden. The defeat marked the end of the last Stewart attempt to regain, by force, the throne forfeited by James VII. Bonnie Prince Charlie refused the advice of his most able general, Lord George Murray, over the positioning of the Jacobite forces, letting himself be persuaded into placing his troops on an open moor, which gave all advantages to the Hanoverians. Charles compounded this error by choosing this moment to take personal charge of his force for the first time. In less than an hour the government force, outnumbering the Jacobites two to one and with a vast advantage in artillery, defeated them for the first and last time.

On this day in 1728, Joseph Black, the Scottish physicist and chemist, was born. Black was actually born in Bordeaux, where his father was a wine merchant, but is closely associated with Glasgow University, where he worked. Black was the discoverer of "fixed air", which we now know as carbon dioxide. He also formulated the concept of latent heat.

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