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September 20 in Scottish History

On this day in 1842 Sir James Dewar was born in Kincardine on the Forth. Dewar was a student and later a lecturer at Edinburgh University. He then moved south to England; first to Cambridge and then to London. At the time, the facilites in London were much better for conducting experiments, and he did most of his most well known work there. He is principally remembered for his work on the liquefication of gases at low temperatures. By 1891 he was able to produce liquid oxygen, and by 1898, liquid hydrogen. In order to store liquefied oxygen, in about 1872 he invented a double walled flask, the Dewar flask, which was an early version of the thermos flask. From about 1891 he became interested in the study of explosives and produced, together with Frederick Abel, the smokeless explosive cordite.

In 1967, the last of the great passenger liners, the QE2, was launched by the Queen at John Brown's Shipyard in Clydebank. The ship was not named after the Queen, but rather was the second ship to bear that name. This is why the Arabic '2' is used in the name rather than the Roman numerals used by the Queen. The ship made its maiden voyage in 1969. Still in service today, the ship logged 5 million miles at sea in August 2002.