In addition to ammonia and nitric acid, Carl Bosch was involved in taking the coal hydrogenation process of Friedrich Bergius (1884-1949) from pilot plant to large-scale production. In 1925, Bergius sold the rights of the method to BASF. The process at that stage had a number of shortcomings that were corrected by Bosch and his associates.

Bergius had accomplished coal hydrogenation in one step, combining crushed coal with heavy oil or pitch and subjecting the mass to high-pressure hydrogen in a long horizontal reaction vessel. After the reaction, products were separated from residual ash and fractionated.

Bergius had not had the facilities to explore possible catalysts for the reaction, nor had he conducted the reaction in two stages, which the I. G. Farben chemists now found beneficial, separating the hydrogenation and cracking aspects and conducting the latter in the vapor phase.

These improvements enabled I. G. Farben to manufacture synthetic gasoline at its plant in Leuna in everincreasing amounts. As Bosch moved into administration, he had less engineering work to do but was active in negotiations with Bergius and in persuading the other directors to persist with the very expensive coal hydrogenation program. In 1935, Bosch became chairman of the board of directors at I. G. Farben. In this position, he traveled to foreign countries, including the United States, to negotiate commercial agreements for oil and coal hydrogenation.

Beginning in 1933, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to political power in Germany began to have an impact on all aspects of life. Bosch opposed the anti-Semitism of the regime and tried to help some of the non-Aryans who had lost their positions and wanted to leave Germany. For example, he tried to obtain an exit visa for the physicist Lise Meitner (1878-1968), who wanted to immigrate to Denmark. Such an undertaking on his part was not without personal risk, because of the extreme suspicion of the Gestapo.

In 1937, Bosch succeeded Max Planck as the president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, Germany's most important scientific society, and left I. G. Farben. Over the next three years, culminating in his death in 1940, Bosch became increasingly pessimistic about the future of Germany and increasingly a user of drugs and alcohol.

In 1931, Bosch and Bergius shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their achievements in developing high-pressure methods. The synthetic ammonia industry pioneered by Bosch and Haber made nitrogen fertilizer available in hitherto unimaginable quantities and made possible the harvests of wheat and other grains to feed the world.

Within a few years, the Haber-Bosch process was implemented around the world, and today ammonia is produced in eighty countries in amounts that approach 140 million metric tons annually. High-pressure techniques, as perfected by Bosch and others, are used routinely in the modern chemical process industries. On a more somber note, it is likely that Germany in 1914-1918 could not have waged war as long as it did without the explosives made possible by the ammonia and nitric-acid syntheses, and conventional modern warfare is equally dependent on the manufacture of these chemicals. . .

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