MOND, LUDWIG (1839-1909), British chemist, was born at Cassel in Germany on Mar. 7, 1839. After studying at Marburg under Hermann Kolbe and at Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen, he came to England in 1862 and entered into partnership with Mr. Hutchinson, a well-known alkali manufacturer at Widnes, where he elaborated the practical application of a method he had patented for recovering the sulphur lost as calcium sulphide in the black ash waste of the Leblanc alkali process, which he introduced into some 3o works in England and France. He became a natural ized British subject in 1867. In 1873 he entered into partner ship with Sir John Tomlinson Brunner (1842-1919), who was employed in the office of Mr. Hutchinson, and thus founded the great chemical manufacturing firm of Brunner, Mond and Co. They began to make alkali by the ammonia-soda process, under license from the Belgian chemist Ernest Solvay. This process had previously been a failure in all the works it had been experimented on, but Mond gradually conquered the technical difficulties, largely as a result of his inventing and employing strictly scientific methods of controlling the reaction involving the recovery of the ammonia and the other products. About 1879 he began experiments in the economical utilization of fuel and his efforts led him to the system of making producer-gas known by his name (see GAs). In connection with this he worked out a
gas battery. Whilst developing the production of chlorine prod ucts from the ammonium-chloride obtained in the ammonia-soda reactions, he noticed that the nickel valves used for the control of the gases were acted upon by carbon monoxides. A study of the formation of the nickel carbide led to the discovery of nickel carbonyl. The conditions of its formation made possible a suc cessful process for the extraction of nickel from its ores, which involved both the finding, acquisition and development of mines in Canada, the elaboration of new and suitable smelting operations there and the invention of highly specialized apparatus for the refining works in Wales. A liberal contributor to the purposes of research, Mond founded in 1896 the Davy-Faraday Research laboratory in connection with the Royal Institution, and con tributed to the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, to the erection of laboratories and to research at many universities in England (London, Liverpool, Manchester). He died in London on Dec. II, 1909.