Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry

A second and greater opportunity came his way in the spring of 1922. Professor Fritz Haber, discoverer of the Haber ammonia synthesis process and head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry (now known as the Max Planck Institute), contacted Professor Schlenk. 

Most of Mark s work done during this period was done at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of the Chemistry of Fibers or the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, Berlin-Dahlen. His collaborators during this six-year period... 

In September of 1920, Polanyi took a position in Berlin at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fiber Chemistry, which was housed in the buildings of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry directed by Fritz Haber. [8] By this time Polanyi had published his doctoral thesis and papers in several areas of thermodynamics, including papers on Nernst s heat theorem and Einstein s quantum theory for specific heats. [9] In the next 13 years, before he was forced to leave Germany in 1933, Polanyi worked in several areas of physical chemistry in Berlin, afterwards heading Manchester s physical chemistry laboratory for fifteen years. In 1948 Polanyi exchanged his professorship in chemistry at Manchester for a chair in social studies, thus formally becoming a philosopher. 

In the fall of 1928, I came to Berlin to start my Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. I was accepted as a doctoral student at the recommendation of my brother Ladislas who was then private assistant to Fritz Haber, the director of the Institute and a coworker of Dr. Bonhoeffer. 

Dr. Fritz Haber, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. ... 

Hahn followed Haber to work on gas warfare. So did the physicist James Franck, head of the physics department at Haber s institute, who, like Haber and Hahn, would later win the Nobel Prize. So did a crowd of industrial chemists employed by I.G. Farben, a cartel of eight chemical companies assembled in wartime by the energetic Carl Duisberg of Bayer. The plant at Leverkusen with the new lecture hall turned up hundreds of known toxic substances, many of them dye precursors and intermediates, and sent them off to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry for study. Berlin acquired depots for gas storage and a school where Hahn instructed in gas defense. 

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. 

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry... 

Haber s official appointment as director of the newly-founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Eiectrochemistry and his reiease from his post in Karisruhe would not be finalized until June of 1911 nevertheless, he rapidly became engrossed in the construction of the Berlin institute. In the months preceding his permanent move to Dahlem, Haber commuted frequentiy between Karisruhe, where he still had teaching duties, and Berlin. Whiie in Beriin, Haber not oniy offered input on architectural plans for the new Institute but aiso had a hand in drafting its charter and made suggestions concerning its future operation. So far as the charter was concerned, Haber aimed to ensure, in his own words ... 

Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer and Arnold Eucken, met similar resistance. The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Defense wanted application-oriented, military research to continue at the Institute until an appropriate military institute could be established. Hence, as far as the two Ministries were concerned, Thiessen was a far more suitable Director than the lauded scientists proposed by the KWG. While this debate unfolded between the ministries and the KWG, Thiessen was promoted to an academic post adequate for a KWG director. After he had failed to find a position in Freiburg or Frankfurt, Thiessen was offered the post of Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Chemistry Institute at Munster in March of 1935, succeeding Rudolf Schenck. Though his appointment was confirmed by the Ministry of Education on 1 April 1935, Thiessen never occupied the post. On 20 May 1935 the Ministry of Education named Thiessen Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, as well as Professor for Physical Chemistry at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In the minutes of the Institute s board meeting a month later, Planck noted that the naming of the new Institute Director had come about in an unusual manner nevertheless, he accepted the political imposition and expressed his desire to work together with Thiessen. 

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry was established in 1911 as one of the first two institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG). Its successor, the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI), is not only one of the oldest and most tradition rich institutes of the Max Planck Society (MPG), but also one of the most distinguished, with the highest number of affiliated Nobel Laureates of any KWG/MPG institute. These include Fritz Haber, the founding director, the later directors Max von Laue, Ernst Ruska and Gerhard Ertl, and several scientists who served at the Institute in lesser capacities, such as James Franck, Eugene Wigner and Heinrich Wieland. 

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