WHEN COP26 comes to Glasgow in some form later this year, the organisers must make sure that those attending or spectating at home become aware of the extraordinary contribution to the science of environmental chemistry made by a Glaswegian, Angus Smith, born in this week of 1817.

You may not have heard of him, but we have all heard of acid rain, defined by National Geographic magazine thus: “Acid rain describes any form of precipitation that contains high levels of nitric and sulfuric acids. It can also occur in the form of snow, fog, and tiny bits of dry material that settle to Earth.”

You probably think it is a recently-minted term, and certainly it is only in recent decades that acid rain has become a big public concern. Yet the words “acid rain” were coined as long ago as 1859 by Angus Smith, who seven years earlier had made the discovery that northern cities across Britain were suffering from rainfall that contained heavy pollutants that were the result of the burning of coal that was rich in sulphur. His research found that the worst-affected city was his home town of Glasgow.

Robert Angus Smith was born in Pollokshaws on February 15, 1817, the seventh son and 12th child of John Smith, originally from Ayrshire, and his wife Janet, daughter of James Thomson who owned a mill at Strathaven in Lanarkshire.

His elder brother John was a big influence on Angus’s life. John eventually became a senior teacher at Perth Academy, and was himself a scientist who would research theories on colour and light. He encouraged his younger brother to read the works of Joseph Priestley, the pioneering English chemist, and Angus Smith was greatly influenced by Priestley’s writings.

He attended Glasgow University from the age of 13, apparently to prepare for a career in the Church of Scotland ministry, but he left without graduating and then became a tutor to families, first in Scotland and then in England. In 1839 he accompanied the Bridgeman family to Germany where he remained to study under the Professor Justus Liebeg, gaining his PhD in 1841.

On returning to England he took a post at Manchester Royal Institution as assistant to Lyon Playfair, an Indian-born Scot and a scientist and politician.

Playfair passed on his own interest in the sanitation of towns and cities to Angus Smith, who left the Institution to set up in business as an analytical chemist. As concern grew about pollution, his services were in demand, and in one famous experiment he waited until a crowded room had emptied then collected the residue on windows to prove that human breath exuded not just carbon dioxide but organic matter dangerous to health.

Smith once graphically described the effects of Manchester’s polluted atmosphere, in a letter to the Manchester Guardian published on November 2, 1844.

He wrote: “Coming in from the country last week on a beautiful morning, when the air was unusually clear and fresh, I was surprised to find Manchester was enjoying the atmosphere of a dark December day… Those who would defend such evils, who would remain careless as long as any probable cause is unremoved, must surely be devoid not only of mercy, but of clear perception and of good taste. The gloominess of uncleanness is everywhere around us.”

In 1851 he began the research that would make him the “father of acid rain” as he is often known. Smith proved that sulphur compounds in the air of towns and cities were the result of burning coal and coke transported in air and rainwater, and even as the industrial revolution was bringing more and more factories into being, Smith was arguing that manufacturers should be held responsible for their pollution.

He investigated poor housing and water quality, and published numerous papers that formed the basis of the developing science of environmental chemistry. One report on the problems of pollution for the Royal Mines Commission was particularly devastating in its scientific indictment of the polluters.

Smith was called as an expert witness in a court case over factory and mine pollution and his testimony was convincing. Consequently when the British Government decided to legislate – in the Alkali Act of 1863 – to try and cut pollution from mining and manufacturing, there was really only one man to turn to as the first chief of the alkali inspectorate and thus Smith spent much of the next two decades transforming attitudes to pollution.

In 1872 Smith published his Air and Rain, the beginnings of a Chemical Climatology, in which he collected the result of his experiments. It proved how ground-breaking his work had been.

With honorary degrees from both Glasgow and Edinburgh University, Angus Smith was honoured in his own lifetime. His health declined badly in his later years and he died at at Colwyn Bay, North Wales, on May 12, 1884, being buried in the churchyard of St Paul’s, Kersal, Manchester.

He was paid a most generous tribute in the first edition of Nature magazine following his death: “For upwards of 40 years he laboured unceasingly to show how chemistry might minister to the material comfort and physical well-being of men — not in the manufacture of new compounds useful in the arts, or in the establishment of new industries – but in raising the general standard of the health of communities by checking or counteracting the evils which have followed in the train of that enormous development of the manufacturing arts which is the boast of this century.

“In his true vocation, as the chemist of sanitary science, Smith worked alone, and we have yet to find the man on whom his mantle has fallen.”

When COP26 comes around, let’s remember Angus Smith.