Brothers of invention

Published on Monday 1 September 2003 01:00

AN INVENTIVE race, the Scots, as we never tire of reminding ourselves, and the rest of the world, at the drop of an outsize hat.

Over the past few years a welter of books about the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment and its legacy - most recently Capital of the Mind by James Buchan - has further served to massage the already swollen national ego. It seems that the lad o’ pairts was behind just about everything, from America’s Declaration of Independence to keeping the trains running on time in India.

The one thing we can’t come up with, it seems, is a means of running an educational science centre without public funding. Hence the ignominious closure at the weekend of the Big Idea at Irvine, a museum dedicated to the very spirit of invention. Opened three years ago in a suitably futuristic-looking building on Irvine’s Ardeer peninsula, former site of one of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel’s explosive factories, the Big Idea was intended, as its website assured us, as "a living laboratory for people who wish to think, to dream, to discover, to innovate and to invent".

The dream went pop last week, however, when John Moorhouse, the centre’s chairman, announced its closure, adding that it had originally set out to be unique by proving it could operate without ongoing public funding.

Despite a 410,000 grant from the Scottish Executive and the Millennium Commission to pay off the remainder of its 11 million construction costs, plummeting visitor figures, not helped by this year’s hot summer, had contributed towards some 3,000,000 in debts. Moorhouse admitted that he had to accept that such a centre simply could not survive without public subsidy. "There is not a single science centre which operates without it," he said.

Quite apart from ongoing concerns about the viability of other science centres such as Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth or the Glasgow Science Centre, there a perverse irony in a Scottish invention centre forced to close at a time when you can’t move without being beat about the head by weighty tomes bearing titles such as How the Scots Invented the Modern World.

Perhaps it remains ever the case that while bright ideas may come ten a penny, finding the wherewithal to bring them to fruition is another matter. The directors of the Big Idea would find little comfort in a hoary old joke which combines our reputation for inventiveness with another much-mythogised national characteristic, that one about copper wire being invented by two Scotsmen fighting over a penny.