1878 in Scotland

← 1877 1876 1875 1874 1873 1878 in Scotland → 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883
Centuries:	17th 18th 19th 20th 21st
Decades:	1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s
See also:	List of years in Scotland Timeline of Scottish history 1878 in: The UK • Wales • Elsewhere Scottish football: 1877–78 • 1878–79

Events from the year 1878 in Scotland.

Incumbents

Law officers

• Lord Advocate – William Watson
• Solicitor General for Scotland – John Macdonald

Judiciary

• Lord Justice General – Lord Glencorse
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Moncreiff

Events

• 14 January – Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone to Queen Victoria.^[1]
• Roman Catholic Church, carried out on the instructions of the newly appointed Pope Leo XIII
  .
• Tay Bridge across the Firth of Tay is ceremonially opened, its engineer, Thomas Bouch, being made a burgess of Dundee. Designed in iron to replace a train ferry, it is the world's longest bridge at this date.^[2]
• 12 December – the iron-hulled full-rigged ship Falls of Clyde is launched at Russell & Company's yard at Port Glasgow for Wright and Breakenridge's Glasgow-based Falls Line. In 1968 she will be laid up as a museum ship in Honolulu
  .
• Sophia Jex-Blake sets up in practice in Edinburgh as the city's first woman doctor.
• The
  hydropathic establishment in Moffat
  is opened.
• Construction of forts on Inchkeith begins.
• West coast shipping operator David Hutcheson & Co. passes wholly to control of David MacBrayne.
• The sanitary porcelainware works at Barrhead that becomes part of Armitage Shanks is established.

Births

• 20 January – Finlay Currie
  , actor (died 1968 in England)
• 23 March – Muirhead Bone
  , graphic artist (died 1953 in England)
• Alex McDonald, footballer (died 1949
  )
• 24 July – Louisa Jordan
  , nurse (died 1915 in Serbia)
• 10 August – Louis Esson, poet and playwright (died 1943 in Australia
  )
• 14 December – James Greenlees, rugby union footballer, educationalist and soldier (died 1951
  )
• Robert Freeman, Baptist minister in the United States
• Bombay
  )

Deaths

• 26 January – Kirkpatrick Macmillan, inventor of the bicycle (born 1812
  )
• 19 February – George Paul Chalmers, painter (born 1833
  ; died as the result of a street attack)
• 6 June – Robert Stirling, Church of Scotland minister and inventor of the Stirling engine (born 1790
  )
• 13 August – George Gilfillan, writer and poet (born 1813
  )
• 5 December – George Whyte-Melville, novelist and poet (born 1821)^[3]
• Jardine, Matheson & Co. (born 1796
  )

• July – William McGonagall journeys on foot from Dundee to Balmoral Castle over mountainous terrain and through a violent thunderstorm in a fruitless attempt to perform his verse before Queen Victoria.^[4]

See also

• Timeline of Scottish history
• 1878 in Ireland

References