Ludwig Mond

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Ludwig Mond
Brunner Mond & Company
Mond Nickel Company
Doctoral advisorHermann Kolbe
Robert Bunsen

Ludwig Mond FRS (7 March 1839 – 11 December 1909[1]) was a German-born British chemist and industrialist.[2] He discovered an important, previously unknown, class of compounds called metal carbonyls.

Education and career

Ludwig Mond was born into a

University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen but he never gained a degree.[3] 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 ash.[4]

In 1872 Mond got in touch with the Belgian industrialist

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.[3] Within 20 years the business had become the largest producer of soda ash in the world.[4]

Mond continued to research new chemical processes. He discovered

nickel carbonyl, a previously unknown compound and the first-discovered in the class of metal carbonyls, which could be easily decomposed to produce pure nickel from its ores through the Mond process.[5] He founded the Mond Nickel Company to exploit this. Ores from nickel mines in Canada were given preliminary enrichment there and then shipped to Mond's works at Clydach, near Swansea, Wales for final purification.[4]

He was one of the first industrialists of his time who offered his employees paid holidays and fringe-benefits.[6]

Honours and benefactions

Mond supported scientific societies and, with

Henry Roscoe, helped to expand the small Lancashire Chemical Society into the nationwide Society of Chemical Industry of which he was elected president in 1888.[7] He was elected to the Royal Society in 1891.[8] Abroad, he was elected to membership of the German Chemical Society, the Società Reale of Naples, and the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Padua, Heidelberg, Manchester and Oxford and was awarded the grand cordon of the Order of the Crown of Italy.[4]

He was a benefactor to a number of scientific organisations including the Royal Society, the Italian

National Gallery, London.[4] His wife left a large collection of materials relating to German literature to King's College, London.[9]

The Royal Society of Chemistry awards the Ludwig Mond Award in his honour.[10] A statue of him, designed by Édouard Lantéri (1912), stands in front of the former Brunner Mond offices in Winnington, flanked by a statue of Brunner.[11] Another statue of Mond is sited across from the Mond Nickel Works in Clydach, Wales, and is a Grade II listed structure [12]

Family and personal

Ludwig Mond (right) as a member of the Corps Rhenania Heidelberg, ca. 1856

In October 1866 Mond married his cousin

St Pancras cemetery where his sons erected a mausoleum. His estate was valued at £1 million.[4]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Ludwig Mond". Encyclopædia Britannica. 28 February 2018.
  2. ^ "Mond, Ludwig". Who's Who. Vol. 59. 1907. p. 1241.
  3. ^ a b Weintraub, Bob (2003). "Ludwig Mond: Great Chemist-Industrialist; Alfred Mond (Lord Melchett): Great Zionist Leader", Bulletin of the Israel Chemical Society, Vol. 14, December 2003, pp. 26–31. Online version retrieved 13 December 2006.
  4. ^
    doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/51124. Retrieved 20 August 2013. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) ((subscription or UK public library membership
    required)    )
  5. doi:10.1039/CT8905700749
    .
  6. ^ "Society of Chemical Industry - Ludwig Mond".
  7. ^ "SCI Presidents".
  8. JSTOR 29777119
    .
  9. ^ The Mond Bequest at King's College London: A Celebration, King's College London, retrieved 21 April 2009
  10. ^ "Royal Society of Chemistry Ludwig Mond Award".
  11. ^ Historic England, "Statue of Ludwig Mond in front of Research Lab., Winnington Works (1139114)", National Heritage List for England, retrieved 19 May 2019
  12. ^ "Statue of Sir Ludwig Mond, Clydach, Swansea".

Further reading

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