Carl Bosch

Carl Bosch was a German chemist and engineer who took Fritz Haber's laboratory-scale process for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen and solved the immense engineering challenge of running that reaction at industrial scale under extreme pressure and heat. The resulting Haber-Bosch process, commercialized at BASF's Oppau plant from 1913, remains the foundation of the world's synthetic nitrogen fertilizer supply. As chairman of the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, Bosch also oversaw the industrial development of high-pressure coal hydrogenation into synthetic liquid fuel, applying the same high-pressure catalytic engineering principles his ammonia work had pioneered. He shared the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Friedrich Bergius for their contributions to high-pressure chemical methods.