I read a snooty post here or on usenet a while back where someone seemed to feel pretty superior that they knew that the concept of having someone named Scotty, or perhaps just a person of Scottish origin, as an engineer was a reference or homage to some earlier book or movie before the original Star Trek series.
I never found out what that was. What movie or book or whatever is this from before Star Trek?
I don’t think it’s any specific reference. “Scotty” was a pretty common nickname; there are over 200 references in the IMDB (most for Scotty Becket, one of the best of “Our Gang”). Arguably the best Scotty in film was John “Scottie” Ferguson in “Vertigo.”
The Scots have a long reputations as inspired tinkerers and inventors. Off the top of my head, the steam engine, the telephone, adhesive postage stamps, reaping machines, Bakelite, thermos bottles (Dewar’s flasks), and golf were all invented or perfected by Scotsmen.
It makes perfect sense to have a Canadian actor use a music-hall Aberdeen accent to give himself credibility as an engineer…
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle ut a Scottish engineer in their classic book A Mote in God’s Eye They defended themselves by saying that Scts had a long tradition as ship’s engineers (as DrFidelius notes above.). That said, I don’t know of any particular character elsewhere named “Scotty”.
I can’t remember the name of it now, but there was a science fiction story written in the 1930s or possibly 1920s which featured a rocket ship that made deliveries to a moon colony. There was some kind of accident and they had to make an emergency trip through a meteor shower or something like that. Anyway, two things were particularly memorable - that they used slide-rules to do most of their calculations (despite having a computer autopilot) and that their engineer was just like Star Trek’s Scotty.
The steam engine was perfected by James Watt, a Scotsman. In their original incarnations, steam engines were cantankerous and fickle mechanisms that tried the patience of whatever poor schmuck was tasked to maintain them. It quickly became legend that only a gruff Scotsman had the temperment to deal with such a contraption and so it was that ships quite frequently had Scottish engineers running the engine room. Rodenberry was giving a nod to ancient tradition with his creation of Scotty.
“All Scots are engineers, and all engineers are Scots.”
There is a grain of truth to that statement. For a relatively small country, Scotland abounds with engineering schools. Furthermore, they have a long tradition of hands-on apprenticeship.
This paper speculates that Scottish boys were sought after by the Royal Navy in the 1840s because of their parish school educations and (presumably) high literacy rates.
Didn’t a Clarke book have a Scottish engineer, and remark on it? Maybe Imperial Earth?
Something like a 100 years ago it is estimated that 1/3 of all ships in the world were built on the River Clyde in Scotland. Star Trek was therefore using a well established character of the Scottish ship engineer.
Perhaps James Doohan recognised this as a tired cliche, and so decided to subvert it by putting on a ridiculous accent that quite obviously wasn’t Scottish.
Or maybe he just couldn’t do accents.
I read that James Doohan was asked to try various accents for the engineer character and he suggested that the character be a Scot because of Scotland’s tendency to turn out great engineers.