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Ludwig Mond FRS (7 March 1839 – 11 December 1909) was a German-born British and . He discovered an important, previously unknown, class of compounds called .


Education and career
Ludwig Mond was born into a family in , Germany. His parents were Meyer Bär (Moritz) Mond and Henrietta Levinsohn. After attending schools in his home town, he studied at the University of Marburg under Hermann Kolbe and at the University of Heidelberg under 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 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 from the by-products of the , which was used to manufacture .

In 1872 Mond got in touch with the Belgian industrialist who was developing a better process to manufacture soda ash, the . 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 , building a factory at , . 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 ash in the world.

Mond continued to research new chemical processes. In 1890 he discovered , a previously unknown compound and the first-discovered in the class of , which could be easily decomposed to produce pure from its through the . He founded the Mond Nickel Company to exploit this, and thus was born the Victoria Mine of the . Ores from nickel mines in Canada were given preliminary enrichment there and then shipped to Mond's works at Clydach, near , Wales for final purification.

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


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. He was elected to the in 1891. and to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 18 October 1881,{ https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/74442#page/37/mode/1up 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.

He 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. In his will he left bequests to the town of Kassel and to a number of Jewish charities. In his later years he had built up a collection of paintings and he left the greater proportion of these to the National Gallery, London. His wife left a large collection of materials relating to German literature to King's College, London.

The Royal Society of Chemistry awards the Ludwig Mond Award in his honour. 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. Another statue of Mond is sited across from the Mond Nickel Works in Clydach, , and is a Grade II listed structure


Family and personal
In October 1866 Mond married his cousin (1847–1923) in her native town of Cologne. They soon moved to England and had two sons, and Alfred, who was later known as the 1st Lord Melchett. In 1880 he took British nationality. While he was establishing his business the family lived at Winnington and in 1884 they moved to London. From the early 1890s on, he spent most of his winters in Rome at his home there. This home, the Palazzo Zuccari, was first leased and then (1904) bought in the name of his wife's friend , who developed it into a study centre for the history of art now called Bibliotheca Hertziana. He died in his London home, 'The Poplars', Avenue Road, near Regent's Park. Although he had never practised any religion he was buried with Jewish rites at St Pancras cemetery where his sons erected a . His estate was valued at £1 million.


See also


Further reading
  • Thomas Adam, Transnational Philanthropy: the Mond Family's Support for Public Institutions in Western Europe from 1890 to 1938, New York 2016.

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