15 Facts About Ludwig Mond

Ludwig Mond FRS was a German-born, British chemist and industrialist.

Ludwig Mond discovered an important, previously unknown, class of compounds called metal carbonyls.

Ludwig Mond was born into a Jewish family in Kassel, Germany.

Ludwig Mond's parents were Meyer Bar Mond and Henrietta Levinsohn.

In 1872 Mond got in touch with the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay who was developing a better process to manufacture soda ash, the ammonia-soda or Solvay process.

Ludwig 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.

Ludwig Mond 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.

Ludwig Mond founded the Mond Nickel Company to exploit this.

Ludwig Mond was one of the first industrialists of his time who offered his employees paid holidays and fringe-benefits.

Ludwig 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.

Ludwig Mond was elected to the Royal Society in 1891.

Ludwig Mond 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.

Ludwig Mond was a benefactor to a number of scientific organisations including the Royal Society, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Ludwig Mond's wife left a large collection of materials relating to German literature to King's College, London.

In October 1866 Ludwig Mond married his cousin Frida Lowenthal in her native town of Cologne.