Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research

It is significant that Perkin sold out to a German. In Europe a newly united Germany had resolved to secure self-sufficiency and its place in European and world economies. And it did so with the marriage of science and industry. In the 1910s the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry were endowed, and other institutes with a pragmatic focus were quickly established thereafter (such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research). The kaiser was motivated by the success he had already seen from the cooperation of German industrial and academic chemistry— based almost entirely on the success of textile dyes. 

Franz Fischer (1877-1947) a German chemist who together with Hans Tropsch discovered in the 1920 the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. He also worked with Wilhelm Ostivald and Emil Fischer, in 1914, he became Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research. 

Hans Tropsch (1889-1935) A German chemist born in German Bohemia (now Czech Republic). From 1920 until 1928 he worked ai the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research both with Franz Fischer and Otto Roelen. in 1928 he became professor at the Institute for Coal Research in Prague. From 1931 until 1935, he worked in the United States at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago. Owing to an illness he returned to Germany in 1935, where he died shortly after his arrival. 

The basic reaction was discovered in 1923 by F. Fischer and H. Tropsch, working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research in Miilheim, Germany. In 1984, Mako and Samuel wrote, The quantity of patents and literature that has appeared on the subject in the past 60 years makes it virtually impossible to retrace stepwise the developments of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. The first full-scale plant was built by Ruhrchemie at Holten, from 1934 to 1936 by 1939, eight more plants had been built in Germany. All of these plants were disabled by air attacks in 1944. Used in the SASOL coal gasification plant in South Africa. The first modern Fischer-Tropsch plant outside Africa was built by Shell in Malaysia in 1993, based on natural gas. 

M. T. Reetz, M. W. Drewes, and R. Schwickardi, Max-Planck Institute for Coal Research, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz 1,45470 Mulheim an der Ruhr, Germany. 

During the foundation period of these new institutes between 1917 and 1922, industrialists, scientists, and bureaucrats looked upon earlier Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (for chemistry, physical chemistry, coal research) as exemplars and hoped to achieve similiar success. Their perception was that the German chemical firms had been successful because they had internally elaborated research and development structures as well as research institutions within the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. Moreover, the close... 

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