The Little Book of Scotland Facts: Fascinating Things You Never Knew About the Land of Invention

Scotland is a country of five million people that somehow changed the world for eight billion.

The telephone, the television, the pneumatic tyre, the ATM, penicillin, the vacuum flask, fingerprint forensics, and the very system of time zones the entire planet runs on — all invented by Scots. But that's only the beginning. Inside this book, you'll find the Loganair flight between two Orkney islands that covers 1.7 miles in a scheduled 90 seconds (record: 53 seconds, with a good tailwind). You'll read about the three lighthouse keepers who vanished without a trace from a remote Scottish island on Boxing Day 1900, leaving behind a half-eaten meal, an overturned chair, and a mystery that has never been solved. You'll find out why 149,415 people crammed into Hampden Park in Glasgow on a single April afternoon in 1937 — a European attendance record that can never, mathematically, be broken. And you'll meet the sheep born in a Midlothian lab in 1996 who was named after Dolly Parton for reasons that made perfect scientific sense.

Short enough to read in a sitting, surprising enough to keep you up past your bedtime, this book is for anyone who has ever felt that Scotland deserves more than a quick mention. Jonah Keene and The FACTory Press have packed 100 facts into 100 pages — every one of them true, every one of them worth knowing.

The perfect gift for: history lovers & proud Scots · trivia fans & pub quiz champions · Anyone who loves the world's most inventive small country