Robert Burns's first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published by John Wilson of Kilmarnock on 31 July, 1786. Some 652 copies were printed, 235 pages of verse stitched in a blue paper cover. The Bard was 27 and had written mos
t of the poems, apart from Tam o' Shanter, on which his fame would rest. He wrote to a friend, "I have at last made my public appearance and am solemnly inaugurated into the numerous company of Authors."
2 DR PRITCHARDA huge Glasgow Fair crowd turned out on 28 July, 1865 to witness the final appearance of Dr William Pritchard, the human crocodile. The philanderer's liaison with his Highland maid was an affair too far for his wife and mother-in-law, so he poisoned them. A previous maid, pregnant, had been burned to death. He confessed his guilt before mounting the scaffold for the city's last public hanging. His end was protracted and painful, bungled by the hangman.
3 BENNIE RAILPLANEGeorge Bennie's Railplane was an elegant, giant cigar with art-deco easy chairs. Propeller-powered, with wheels under-neath on a stabilising rail, it was suspended from girders which could straddle a working railway line. High-speed travel was promised. On 8 July, 1930 a test track opened near Milngavie. But there were no financial backers. Bennie went bankrupt in 1937.
4 LIVADIALuxurious steam yacht, with fountain and flowerbeds, designed by Admiral Popov for Tsar Alexander II and launched on 7 July, 1880 at John Elder's Govan yard. But the vessel was was sea-sickeningly unstable and its first storm-tossed voyage was its last. It was left to rot in the Black Sea but there's a model in Glasgow Museum of Transport.
5 GREAT FIRE OF GLASGOWOn 17 July, 1652, 14 years before London's inferno and likewise preceded by plague. A third of the city's wooden-walled, thatched-roof houses were destroyed. The town council recorded "thair will be neir four scoir closses all burnt, estimat about ane thousand families". As a belated result, an "ingyne for slockening of fyre" was purchased four years later: Glasgow's first fire engine.
The full article contains 364 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
