City of Discovery

Electric street-lighting

Dundee was the first city in the world to have electric street lights, employing bulbs designed by James Bowman Lindsay.

The postage stamp

James Chalmers is recognised as having invented the modern postage stamp in Dundee. His tombstone, in the Howff burial ground, reads: “Originator of the adhesive postage stamp which saved the penny postage scheme of 1840 from collapse rendering it an unquallified (sic) success and which has since been adopted throughout the postal systems of the world.”

The ATM

A series of innovations by NCR Corporation (including the development of magnetic-strip readers for cash registers) culminated in the production of the first ATM, or ‘hole in the wall’ cash machine, at its Dundee plant in the late 1960s.

Computing

The first Sinclair home computers were produced at the Timex factory in Dundee in the early 1980s. The computer games firm Rockstar North — developer of the extraordinarily successful Lemmings and the Grand Theft Auto series — was founded in Dundee as DMA Design. For a small city thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, Dundee’s impact on the computing industry has been extraordinary.

Aspirin

It is known that Dr Thomas John MacLagan first developed aspirin in 1876 whilst working at the old Dundee Royal Infirmary. Today aspirin and its derivatives are used worldwide for the treatment of fever and pain and more recently have been shown to be helpful in reducing the risk of having a heart attack.