Otto Röhm

Otto Röhm (1876 to 1939) was a German chemist and entrepreneur, one of the founders and for many years president of the chemical company Röhm und Haas. He was born in Öhringen on 14 March 1876, trained as a pharmacy assistant, studied pharmacy at Munich and Tübingen and completed his studies there in 1901 with a chemistry dissertation on the polymerisation products of acrylic acid. After working as a researcher at Merck and for the Stuttgart city gasworks, he developed an enzymatic leather bating process sold under the brand name Oropon, and in 1907 he founded Röhm & Haas with the businessman Otto Haas in Esslingen, later moving the German operation to Darmstadt. The firm later developed an American branch and, in Germany, became Röhm GmbH. He is named on more than seventy patents, was the first chemist to apply enzymes industrially, and in 1933 patented and registered the Plexiglas brand. When he died in Berlin on 17 September 1939 Röhm GmbH employed 1,800 workers.