Background
ludwig Mond was born on March 7, 1839 in Cassel, Germany into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family.
ludwig Mond was born on March 7, 1839 in Cassel, Germany into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family.
He attended the Polytechnic School of Kassel and then studied in Marburg under Hermann Kolbe and in Heidelberg under R. W. Bunsen.
From 1856 to 1859 he worked with Bunsen at Heidelberg.
In 1867 he settled in Widnes, one of the centers of the Leblanc soda trade in England. Many unsuccessful attempts had been made to develop a simpler alternative to the Leblanc process by treating salt solutions with ammonia and carbon dioxide.
By 1865 Ernest Solvay in Belgium had brought the process to some measure of efficiency, and a meeting between Mond and Solvay led to Mond’s acquisition in 1872 of a license to use the process in England.
The corporation of Brunner and Mond (1881) was the first real threat to the survival of the Leblanc soda trade. The search for a cheap source of ammonia for his soda works led Mond to examine ways of obtaining ammonia from coal.
Nickel valves in the plant became corroded, although this did not happen in the laboratory apparatus.
Carbon monoxide in the kiln gases used to sweep ammonia out of the plant proved to be the reason.
Experiments showed that nickel combined with carbon monoxide under gentle heat to form nickel carbonyl Ni(CO)4, which on thermal decomposition yielded pure nickel.