Friedrich Bergius

Friedrich Bergius was married to Margarete Bergius and had two children - Renate Juliusberger and Johannes Bergius.

On 30 March 1949, he died in Buenos Aires and was buried at the La Chacarita Cemetery.

Friedrich Bergius was born on October 11, 1884, in Goldschmieden near Breslau in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. He belonged to a distinguished family of scientists, theologians, civil servants, army officers, and businesspersons.

Bergius’ grandfather was Professor of Economics in Breslau. His father used to run a chemical factory in Goldschmieden. It is in this factory that the young Bergius carried out his early experiments.

He worked for 6 months at the Friedrich Wilhelms steel works in Mülheim before studying chemistry.

In 1903, he started studying at the University of Breslau under Ladenburg, Abegg and Herz.

In 1907, he earned his PhD degree in chemistry at the University of Leipzig. He worked on sulphuric acid as solvent and Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch supervised the thesis.

In1910 Bergius established his own private laboratory in Hanover to carry out his work on the chemical equilibrium in gas reactions— the synthesis of ammonia.

For a brief period in 1911, Bergius worked as a lecturer at the Technische Hochschule in Hanover. He taught technical gas reactions, equilibrium theory, and metallurgy.

In 1913, he developed techniques for the high-pressure and high-temperature chemistry of substrates that contain carbon and he received a patent on the Bergius process.

In 1914, Theodor Goldschmidt sponsored the building of Bergius’ industrial plant at his factory the Th. Goldschmidt AG.

Bergius included German companies, the Shell Trust and a number of British enterprises, in particular the coal industry, to collaborate with him in the development of hydrogenation.

The most important research of Friedrich Bergius was the hydrogenating effect of hydrogen on coal and heavy oils under high pressure. He started with a thorough study on the dissociation of calcium peroxide. Later, he came up with a practical method for laboratory work at pressures of up to 300 atmospheres. He developed this process before the popularly known Fischer-Tropsch process came into being. Due to the successful commercialization of this process, the I.G. Farben Group profited from huge coal gasoline subsidies from the National Socialist government. He also made possible the hydrolysis of cellulose in wood and parallel substances to sugar.