Ludwig Mond FRS (7 March 1839 – 11 December 1909) was a German-born, British chemist and industrialist. He discovered an important, previously unknown, class of compounds called metal carbonyls. Education and career Ludwig Mond was born into a Jewish family in Kassel, Germany. His parents were Meyer Bär (Moritz) Mond and Henrietta Levinsohn. After attending schools in his home town, he studied chemistry at the University of Marburg under Hermann Kolbe and at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen but he never gained a degree. He then worked in factories in Germany and the Netherlands before coming to England to work at the factory of John Hutchinson & Co in Widnes in 1862. He worked in Utrecht for the firm of P. Smits & de Wolf from 1864 to 1867 and then returned to Widnes. Here he formed a partnership with John Hutchinson and developed a method to recover sulphur from the by-products of the Leblanc process, which was used to manufacture soda ash. In 1872 Mond got in touch with the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay who was developing a better process to manufacture soda ash, the ammonia-soda or Solvay process. The following year he went into partnership with the industrialist John Brunner to work on bringing the process to commercial viability. They established the business of Brunner Mond & Company, building a factory at Winnington, Northwich. Mond solved some of the problems in the process that had made mass production difficult, and by 1880 he had turned it into a commercially sound process. Within 20 years the business had become the largest producer of soda ash in the world. Mond continued to research new chemical processes. He discovered nickel carbonyl, a previously unknown compound and the first-discovered in the class of metal carbonyls, which could be easily decomposed to produce pure nickel from its ores through the Mond process. He founded the Mond Nickel Company to exploit this. Ores from nickel mines in Canada were given preliminary enrichment there and then shipped to Mond's works at Clydach, near Swansea, Wales for final purification. He was one of the first industrialists of his time who offered his employees paid holidays and fringe-benefits. Honours and benefactions Mond supported scientific societies and, with Henry Roscoe, helped to expand the small Lancashire Chemical Society into the nationwide Society of Chemical Industry of which he was elected president in 1888. He was elected