Hans Tropsch

Hans Tropsch was a German chemist, born October 7, 1889 in Plan bei Marienbad in Austria-Hungary, now in the Czech Republic, and died October 8, 1935 in Essen, Germany, best known for co-developing the coal-to-liquid-fuel process that carries his name. He earned his doctorate at the German Technical University in Prague under Hans Meyer, then worked at a Mulheim dye factory before joining the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research in 1920, where he worked alongside Franz Fischer and Otto Roelen. There he and Fischer developed the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical method for converting synthesis gas made from coal into liquid hydrocarbon fuels, patented during his time at the institute and later adopted at industrial scale wherever a country needed liquid fuel without ready access to crude oil. In 1928 he became a professor at the Institute for Coal Research in Prague, then moved to the United States in 1931 to work for Universal Oil Products and teach at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, before a severe illness brought him back to Germany, where he died shortly after arriving.