Andrew Ure

Independent activity 1778–1857 ○ Natural causes

Scottish chemist whose Philosophy of Manufactures earned him Marx's title "Pindar of the automatic factory"

Born in Glasgow in 1778, he took his MD at the University of Glasgow in 1801 and briefly served as an army surgeon. Professor of natural philosophy at the Andersonian Institution from 1804, he became known for his evening lectures in chemistry and mechanics, and he founded the Garnet Hill Observatory in 1808. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1822. Leaving his chair in 1830, he set up in London as a consulting chemist, probably the first in Britain, working as an expert witness, on government commissions and on industrial tours. His visits to English textile mills produced The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) and An Account of the Cotton Industry (1836), and in 1837 he published his Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines. Marx called him the "Pindar of the automatic factory" in the footnotes of Capital. He died in London in 1857.