How did you go about productizing a chemistry experiment in the early 20th century?
I read The Alchemy of Air earlier this year and highly recommend it. It’s about the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia. There’s a lot of really colorful history about the birth of the dye industry in Germany and the economics of industrial resources in Europe leading up to the world wars.
As a software engineer, I was really interested to hear about how Carl Bosch, the engineer at BASF assigned to productionizing Fritz Haber’s scientific findings, took what was basically a chemistry experiment and turned it into an industrial-scale process that propped up the German economy throughout both World Wars.
Both Bosch and Haber were interesting and…flawed people; there’s more context and detail on Bosch’s strivings in his Nobel Prize speech if you want to delve a bit beyond what the book gets into.