Pitt Street, George Town have lived here for centuries. Pitt Street was named after William Pitt the Younger, who was the Prime Minister of Great Britain between 1783 and 1801. When Captain Francis Light founded Penang Island in 1786, he renamed the island the "Prince of Wales Island" in honour of the Prince of Wales, the new settlement of George Town after King George III and the first street within the settlement after himself. Worried that Prime Minister William Pitt may have felt offended as nothing was named after him, Light felt compelled to name Pitt Street after him. Pitt Street, created soon after
William Pitt Smith William Pitt Smith William Pitt Smith (1760–1796) was a U.S. physician, educator and theological writer. Smith began his career serving in the General Hospital Department of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He became Professor of Materia Medica at Columbia College) in 1792. Smith authored two books that espoused the tenets of Universalism: "The Universalist; in Seven Letters to Amyntor" (1787) and "Observations on Conventions" (1793). In his books, Smith argued that the notion of infinite and universal sin contradicted God's basic nature. Smith's writing also spoke positively of deism, noting its practitioners were "of amiable characters, or sense,