Events from the year 1850 in Scotland.

• 1 April – Aberdeen Railway opens to a terminus at Ferryhill, Aberdeen.
• 15 April – iron paddle steamer SS City of Glasgow, launched on 28 February by Tod & Macgregor of Partick, makes her maiden voyage as the first steamer on the Glasgow–New York route.
• 18 June – paddle steamer Orion sinks off Portpatrick^[1] through the negligence of her master with the loss of 50 lives.
• 17 October – James Young patents a method of distilling paraffin from coal, laying the foundations for the Scottish paraffin industry.
• December – destitute Gaelic speakers from the island of Barra begin to appear in Glasgow, displaced by the Highland Clearances.
• Cox Brothers open the Camperdown Works in Dundee which will become the world's largest jute works.
• Remodelling of Dunrobin Castle completed.
• Skara Brae revealed by weather.

• 4 February – Thomas Lomar Gray, seismologist (died 1908 in the United States)
• 24 April – Murdo MacKenzie, businessman (died 1939 in the United States)
• 30 April – George Gibb, transport administrator (died 1925 in London)
• 12 May – Charles McLaren, 1st Baron Aberconway, jurist, landowner, industrialist and Unionist politician (died 1934 in London)^[2]
• 27 May – Thomas Neill Cream, the "Lambeth Poisoner", serial killer (hanged 1897 in London)
• 14 June – Eliza Humphreys, née Gollan (pen name 'Rita'), novelist (died 1938 in England)
• 13 August – Peter Drummond, steam locomotive engineer (died 1918)
• 22 August – William Morrison, chemist, creator of an electric carriage (died 1927 in the United States)
• 13 November – Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer (died 1894 in Samoa)
• 11 December – Mary Victoria Douglas-Hamilton, married into European nobility (died 1922 in Budapest)

• 26 January – Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey, judge and literary critic (born 1773)
• 5 June – Thomas Brown, architect (born 1781)
• 18 June – John Burns, surgeon (born 1775) (in PS Orion disaster)
• 12 July – Robert Stevenson, civil engineer noted for lighthouses (born 1772)^[3]
• 3 December – John Gibb, civil engineer and contractor (born 1776)
• 29 December – William Hamilton Maxwell, novelist (born 1792 in Ireland)
• Approximate date – Walter Sutherland, last native speaker of the Norn language on Unst

• Timeline of Scottish history
• 1850 in Ireland