Carl Bosch

Carl Bosch, who lived from 27 August 1874 to 26 April 1940, was a German chemist and engineer and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. He was born in Cologne, studied at Charlottenburg and Leipzig, and took his doctorate in 1898 before joining BASF, then Germany's largest chemical and dye firm. From 1909 to 1913 he turned Fritz Haber's tabletop demonstration of nitrogen fixation into the industrial Haber-Bosch process, building the plant and high-pressure equipment that made synthetic nitrate possible at scale, and the first full-scale plant was built at Oppau. He later extended high-pressure methods to synthetic fuel and methanol. In 1925 he helped found IG Farben and became the first head of the company, and from 1935 he was chairman of its board of directors, a role that became largely ceremonial as he opposed Nazi policy and was sidelined. He shared the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Friedrich Bergius.