ABSTRACT
Manchester became Angus Smith’s working and living base from 1843 when Lyon Playfair appointed him as personal assistant at the RMI. Angus Smith remained there for the rest of his life, in preference to London or any other major city, even when he was appointed Inspector of the Alkali Inspectorate. Manchester was transformed by mass industrialization from the late eighteenth century, and by the 1840s was a town known by the sobriquet ‘Cottonopolis’; this epitomized the good and bad effects of industrialization. Probably without knowing it at the time, Angus Smith had moved in 1843 to a town that would provide not only work for an analytical and consulting chemist, but also a ‘laboratory’ in which to investigate both the causes and amelioration of the insanitary conditions and from which he was to make his reputation as an environmental chemist and civil scientist. But how had Manchester grown into this major industrial and commercial town?
