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The Tate almost wasn’t The Tate, and Sir Henry Tate almost wasn’t going to be remembered for anything more than giving his name to one half of the Tate & Lyle sugar company. The institution that he founded and funded by the side of the Thames between Pimlico and Westminster was officially opened as The National Gallery of British Art.

But within days of Edward, the Prince of Wales, cutting the ribbon in the summer of 1897, Londoners had already decided to call it “The Tate”. As a reporter for put it, by the time you had asked the conductor of an omnibus for a ticket to The National Gallery of British Art, the bus would have left without you. In 1932, the official name was changed to Tate Gallery. Today, it is Tate Britain.

By the time of the gallery’s opening, Henry Tate was 78 and had been looking to give his collection of paintings and sculptures to the nation for nearly a decade. It included pictures by his friend John Everett Millais, fellow pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse and Sir Edwin Landseer, and represented what Tate took to be the best of late Victorian art.

But the National Gallery had no room for more pictures. So, Tate put up more than £100,000 (perhaps £17m in today’s money) to build a new gallery. The space offered to him by the government was the site of the Millbank penitentiary, a Bastille-like structure which, until 1857, had acted as a holding pen for convicts sentenced to transportation to Australia.

Now, where convicts used to sit for hours unpicking rope, visitors – once they had climbed the steps and entered the Corinthian portico of Sidney Smith’s classical building – could sail with The Lady of Shalott, drown with , or dream of discovering The North-West Passage. Almost as soon as the Tate opened, other donations meant that the gallery had to be extended. It was an overnight success.

Tate himself was one of those wealthy men who was modest about his achievements and conscientious about the society in which he lived. A sort of anti-Musk. Born in Lancashire in the year of Peterloo, son of a Unitarian clergyman, Tate left school aged 13 to become apprenticed to a Liverpool grocer. By his early twenties he was running his own grocery business, which he expanded into a chain of six shops on Merseyside.

He sold up at the end of the 1850s and became a partner in a sugar-refining business, which he later took over. So far, so unremarkable. Tate was no inventor, but he was one of those businessmen, like King Camp Gillette in the US, who spotted how an existing and popular product could be made vastly more convenient for the consumer.

Till the 1870s, Tate and his contemporaries had been selling sugar in “loaves”, which consumers then had to break down at home using heavy “nippers”. But in 1875, Tate bought the British rights to a process by which the refiners could precut sugar into lumps. The sugar cube had arrived.

The cultural significance of this innovation should never be overlooked. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (first performed in 1895) young Cecily and Gwendolen, having just met, seem to have just discovered that they are affianced to the same man. As Wilde wrote it:

Sugar?
No, thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more.
(looking angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar into the cup): Cake or bread and butter?
: Bread and butter, please. Cake is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays.

We arguably owe that most British of scenes to Henry Tate, who, in 1878, contributed to the capital’s skyline a massive, modern sugar refinery at Silvertown in the London docks. It’s still there.

Nearly a century after the original Tate was opened new Tates began to open up: Tate Liverpool in 1988, Tate St Ives in 1993 and, biggest and brashest of all of them, Tate Modern in 2000 in the old power station on Bankside opposite St Paul’s. Tate Modern is the fourth most-visited attraction in the United Kingdom. Hundreds of millions of people have used the name “Tate” without having any idea where it came from. It is the only artistic institution of its size in Britain, apart from the Victoria and Albert Museum, to bear the name of its founder.

But the original Tate was by no means Sir Henry’s only legacy to the nation. In south London (Tate lived in Streatham), he built four magnificent libraries at Brixton, Streatham, South Lambeth and Balham, all of which survive. He also donated large amounts to University College Liverpool (later the University of Liverpool).

Tate doesn’t just represent himself in this story. From the Middle Ages to the 18th century, wealthy men and women contributed to what we see around us now, by building churches and endowing colleges and schools. But in the period after the Industrial Revolution, philanthropic industrialists helped create the civic environment of our big cities and towns by founding or subsidising museums, art galleries, libraries and workers’ institutes (Tate built one at Silvertown). Their works are all around us, not least in some of the most attractive buildings in our high streets.

And their enterprise went far beyond what they themselves can have imagined. Tate’s artistic tastes, which furnished undergraduate bedrooms in the 70s and 80s – didn’t anticipate which artists from his period we would most value today. There were no Whistlers in his collection – Tate would probably have regarded his pictures as too avant-garde. But all this summer visitors crowded into the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain. Ta very much, Sir Henry. We owe you.