[1] His father Edmund Sr was a London cheesemonger and the brother of inventor Sir Francis Ronalds and his mother Eliza Jemima was the daughter of Dr James Anderson, who ran a respected school in Hammersmith.

[2][3] For most of his childhood the family lived at Brixton Hill but they returned to Islington in 1839 and resided at the east end of Canonbury Place.

Ronalds resigned his chair at Galway in 1856 to run the Bonnington Chemical Works, where the residues from the manufacture of coal gas at the Edinburgh gasworks were processed into valuable products.

Edmund finally closed the works in 1878, when he was suffering extended ill health and Tennent and Tennant had died.

[9] Later volumes in the period to 1867 were written by Richardson and Henry Watts, Ronalds having moved to Bonnington, and a third edition was published in 1889–1903.

[10] While running the Bonnington works, he read a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1864 on the volatile components of Pennsylvanian light petroleum.

[1] They advanced funding to enable their eldest son, chemist Edmund Hugh Ronalds, to purchase the Live Oak Plantation in Florida where he wintered each year.

On his death, it passed to his brother Dr Tennent Ronalds, an obstetrician, who enjoyed hunting and fishing there and at the Orchard Pond Plantation he also purchased.