Ludwig Mond
| Ludwig Mond | |
|---|---|
Portrait of Ludwig Mond by Solomon Joseph Solomon, circa 1909
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| Born | 7 March 1839 Kassel, Hesse-Kassel, Germany |
| Died |
11 December 1909 (aged 70) Regent's Park, London, England |
| Residence | Germany, Netherlands, England |
| Citizenship | British |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Chemist |
| Institutions |
Brunner Mond & Company Mond Nickel Company |
| Alma mater |
University of Marburg University of Heidelberg |
| Doctoral advisor |
Hermann Kolbe Robert Bunsen |
| Known for | Commercial use of the Solvay process Discovery of nickel carbonyl |
| Notable awards | Grand cordon of the Order of the Crown of Italy |
Ludwig Mond (7 March 1839 – 11 December 1909) was a German-born chemist and industrialist who took British nationality. He discovered an important, previously-unknown class of compounds called metal carbonyls.
Ludwig Mond was born into a Jewish family in Kassel, Germany. His parents were Meyer Bär (Moritz) Mond and Henrietta Levinsohn. After attending schools in his home town, he studied chemistry at the University of Marburg under Hermann Kolbe and at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen but he never gained a degree. He then worked in factories in Germany and the Netherlands before coming to England to work at the factory of John Hutchinson & Co in Widnes in 1862. He worked in Utrecht for the firm of P. Smits & de Wolf from 1864 to 1867 and then returned to Widnes. Here he formed a partnership with John Hutchinson and developed a method to recover sulphur from the by-products of the Leblanc process, which was used to manufacture soda.
In 1872 Mond got in touch with the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay who was developing a better process to manufacture soda, the ammonia-soda or Solvay process. The following year he went into partnership with the industrialist John Brunner to work on bringing the process to commercial viability. They established the business of Brunner Mond & Company, building a factory at Winnington, Northwich. Mond solved some of the problems in the process that had made mass production difficult, and by 1880 he had turned it into a commercially sound process. Within 20 years the business had become the largest producer of soda in the world.
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