Abstract
TO the historian of the present day, Andrew Ure (1778-1857) is remembered (if at all) as one of the ghostly figures which flit through the footnotes to Das Kapital , pleading ineffectually for the factory system and the rights of capital. Yet this ‘Pindar of the automatic factory’ as Marx called him, was of importance in his time, as chemist, teacher, and one of the first ‘consultants’ of applied science; a man who, pompous and foolish as he often seems, genuinely strove for an understanding of the industrial revolution, though of course he did not call it that. An anonymous Victorian biography (1) presented him, by omitting most of the facts, as a man both learned and saintly; he was neither. The present sketch should be read as complementing an account published some years ago by his great-great-grandson (2), based on family papers, but dealing hardly at all with his scientific and industrial work.

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