Frederic Kuhlmann

In 1838, Frederic Kuhlmann discovered die formation of nitrogen oxide (NO) during die catalytic oxidation of ammonia. Wilhelm Ostwald developed die production mediods in 1902 and established die base for today s major commercial processes. However, industrial production began only after Haber and Bosch developed the synthesis of ammonia around 1916. 

Ever since England s Humphry Davy observed in the early 1800s that water was formed when hydrogen and oxygen react in the presence of a red-hot platinum wire, the phenomenon which Berzelius was to call catalysis has intrigued chemists. The uses of catalysts in industry were first consciously demonstrated by Peregrine Phillips in 1832 when he used platinum to oxidize sulfur dioxide (S02) to form sulfur trioxide (S03) and by Frederic Kuhlmann in 1837, when he produced nitric acid from ammonia. 

A. Thepot, Frederic Kuhlmann, Industriel et Notable du Nord, 1803-1881 ,68 (265), (1985), 533. At the close of his career, Kuhlmann was also a professor at the Ecole Centrale de Paris. 

F. Barbier (ed.), Le Patromt du Nord sous le Second Empire une Approche Prosopographique (Geneve Lihrairie Droz, 1989), especially, Charles-Frederic Kuhlmann , 257-261. 

Myriam Provence La Descendance de Frederic Kuhlmann , Genealogie-Magazine, 126 (1994), 35-36. 

Ostwald offered the process to the Farbwerke Hoechst, noting that commercialization of the process would remove the threat of an English naval blockade denying Germany access to Chilean nitrates in the case of a war/ As soon as Ostwald s attempt to patent the process became known in 1903, BASF disputed the claim. The company pointed out that the reaction was first described by Charles Frederic Kuhlmann (1803-1881) in 1838, and then in many of his subsequent papers, and it also noted its own research in related areas of high-temperature catalysis. In April 1907 Ostwald was forced to withdraw his claim. By the time BASF decided to go ahead with the oxidation there were no legal problems, but it still had to find a cheaper catalyst. 

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