Ludwig Mond FRS (7 March 1839 – 11 December 1909) was a German-born British chemist and Business magnate. He discovered an important, previously unknown, class of compounds called .
In 1872 Mond got in touch with the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay who was developing a better process to manufacture soda ash, the 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, 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 ash in the world.
Mond continued to research new chemical processes. In 1890 he discovered nickel carbonyl, a previously unknown compound and the first-discovered in the class of , which could be easily decomposed to produce pure nickel from its through the Mond process. He founded the Mond Nickel Company to exploit this, and thus was born the Victoria Mine of the Sudbury Basin. 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.
He was one of the first industrialists of his time who offered his employees paid holidays and fringe-benefits.
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 old master 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, Wales, and is a Grade II listed structure
Honours and benefactions
Family and personal
See also
Further reading
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