Sir Titus Salt, 1st Baronet (20 September 1803 – 29 December 1876) was an English manufacturer, politician and philanthropist in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, who is best known for having built Salt's Mill, a large textile mill, together with the attached village of Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

[7] The story of Salt's discovery of the fibre is well known, not least because it was published by Charles Dickens in a slightly fictionalised form in the magazine Household Words.

[8] Salt came upon bales of alpaca wool in a warehouse in Liverpool and, after taking some samples away to experiment, came back and bought the consignment.

The construction of the village of Saltaire, with its houses, almshouses, shops, schools, an infirmary, a club and institute, baths and washhouses, started in the following year.

Its small size, healthy site, and comparative isolation provided an escape rather than an answer to the problems of urban industrial society".

[14]Saltaire was named alongside Hyde, Egerton (then Turton), Tottington (Bury), Bollington, Holbeck (Leeds), Belper and Copley as an example of workers' colonies built by British rural factory owners in the Austrian economist Emil Sax's 1869 book Die Wohnungszustände der arbeitenden Classen und ihre Reform.

Sax reported that "the employers' main motive for building dwellings for their workers" was to increase their productivity by shortening their walking commute, and construed the projects as "housing reform".

[15] In The Housing Question, Friedrich Engels objected to this view and explained that the colonies constituted a "cottage system" in which the employers doubled as landlords, and could thereby impose monopoly prices and prevent strikes with the threat of eviction.

[16] On these grounds, he commented, "for factory production in the rural districts expenditure on workers' dwellings was a necessary part of the total investment of capital, and a very profitable one, both directly and indirectly".

[10] In 1838, he made a gift to the Bradford Mechanics Hall Building Fund,[17] signalling his support for the education of working people and, in 1842, in response to pollution, he installed Rodda Smoke Burners[18] in the chimneys of his mills.

He need not tell them that he had advocated all the great questions relating to the liberties of the people - amongst others, the Catholic Emancipation Bill, and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, which he supported from first to last.

[26] After he agreed to exhibit at the 1867 Paris Exposition, Salt was awarded the French Légion d'honneur for his exemplary philanthropic approach to business in founding Saltaire.

Most of Salts' gifts benefitted the Bradford area but Hull, Scarborough and Grimsby feature along with places many hundred miles from northern England.

For example “sufferers of a fire in Hamburg” in 1842; “Hungarian refugees” in 1850; and the “sick and wounded of the armies of the two Nations engaged in war on the Continent” in 1870.

"Estimates vary, but the number of people lining the route [of the funeral cortege, from Lightcliffe to Bradford to Saltaire[6]] probably exceeded 100,000.