Famous Scots -
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930)

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a gifted but controversial man. He studied to be a doctor, but due to lack of patients, ended up being a writer. He is best known for his stories about detective Sherlock Holmes, but he also wrote science fiction, historical novels, plays, poetry and political pamphlets.

Although Doyle was raised as a Roman Catholic, he became an agnostic. His stance on religion let to controversy in later life. Before he was twenty he had his first story published in the Chamber's Edinburgh Journal. The first appearance of his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes, was in A Study in Scarlet that came out in Beeton's Christmas Annual. He modeled Holmes after one of his medical professors, Joe Bell. Holmes appeared in 56 short storied and four novels--and was even killed off in one story--but public outcry led to the reappearance of Holmes.

Doyle wrote about the Boer War in South Africa and campaigned for the reform of the Congo Free State. The Lost World was inspired by his interest in Africa, and he believed that his knighthood was received because of his writings about the "dark" continent. He was also very caught up with proving the innocence of two men that had been incarcerated unfairly. This eventually led to the Court of Criminal Appeal being set up in 1907, and another novel, Arthur and George.

In 1912 someone created a phony fossil of an early man by combining a jawbone of an orangutan with the skull of an adult modern human. The bones were found in a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village in East Sussex. In 1953 it was found to be a hoax, but by that time, the early man was given the name of Dawson's Dawn-man, named for a collector. An American historian of science, Richard Milner, presented a case that Conan Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the hoax, due to Doyle's agnostic beliefs and a verbal duel he had with the scientific community over their lack of belief in psychics. The Lost World, according to Milner, has several clues in it, regarding Doyle's involvement in the hoax.