From "Perspex" and polythene to polyester fabrics and beta-blocker heart drugs, the discoveries and innovations from ICIs laboratories have transformed our working and domestic lives. This new edition of a book, first published to mark the ICIs diamond jubilee in 1986, has been completely revised and updated to chart the tumultuous years of change since then, culminating in the historic decision in 1993 to demerge ICs pharmaceuticals and other biosciences businesses into a separate company called Zeneca.

The saga of ICI, Britains biggest manufacturing company for nearly seventy years, is a dramatic story from its beginnings on the liner Aquitania amid an international race to dominate world chemical markets, through its key role in World War II in the development of radar, penicillin and the atomic bomb to the scientific breakthroughs that have shaped many aspects of the way we live now.

The discoveries of the last sixty years are still part of every home and workplace - without the accidental appearance of polythene in a test-tube in 1933, for instance, we would have no food supermarkets. Work being done in todays ICI and Zeneca laboratories could have equal significance for tomorrows world.