Ernest Solvay

Belgian industrial chemist (1838–1922)

Solvay was born at Rebecq-Rognon in Belgium. As the son of a salt refiner and the nephew of a manager of a gas plant, he was introduced at an early age to the techniques and problems of the chemical industry. He devised several methods for purifying gases but is best known for the ammonia–soda process named for him.

For most of the 19th century soda was produced by the Leblanc process. This had a number of disadvantages: it produced toxic hydrochloric acid fumes and also a number of expensive and irrecoverable waste products. As early as 1811 Augustin Fresnel had proposed an ammonia–soda process. However, although chemists succeeded in the laboratory, when they tried to translate their results onto an industrial scale they invariably ended up like James Muspratt, who lost £8000 in the period 1840–42. Solvay was the first to solve the engineering problems of the process. He later confessed that he was completely ignorant of all these earlier failures, adding that he would probably never have tried if he had known.

In 1861 Solvay took out his first patent for soda production and in 1863 set up his first factory at Charleroi, in partnership with his brother. The process involved mixing brine with ammonium carbonate, which produced sodium carbonate and ammonium chloride. The sodium carbonate yielded soda on being heated and the ammonium chloride, when mixed with carbon, regenerated the ammonium carbonate the process started from. Solvay's innovation was to introduce pressurized carbonating towers.

The system was soon adopted throughout the world and by 1900 95% of a greatly increased world production of soda came from the Solvay process. The price of soda fell by more than a half in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Solvay is also remembered for financing the great series of international conferences of physicists starting in 1911, in which much of the new nuclear and quantum physics was discussed.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: Belgian chemist who developed the Solvay process and built factories exploiting it (1838-1922)
  Synonym: Solvay

Ernest Solvay (c1900)

Ernest Solvay (April 16, 1838 - May 26, 1922) was an Belgian chemist, industrialist and philanthropist.

Born at Rebecq, an illness prevented him from going to university. He worked in his uncle's chemical factory from the age of 21.

In 1861, he developed the ammonia-soda process for the manufacture of soda ash (anhydrous sodium carbonate) from brine (as a source of sodium chloride) and limestone (as a source of calcium carbonate). The process was an improvement over the earlier Leblanc process.

He established his first factory at Couillet in 1863 and further perfected the process until 1872, when he patented it. Soon, Solvay process plants were established in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Austria. Today, about 70 Solvay process plants are still operational worldwide.

The exploitation of his patents brought Solvay considerable wealth, which he used for philanthropic purposes, including the establishment in 1894 of the "Institut des Sciences Sociales" (ISS) or Institute for Sociology at the University of Brussels, as well as International Institutes for Physics and Chemistry. In 1903, he founded the Solvay Business School which is also part of the University of Brussels. In 1911, he began a series of important conferences in physics, known as the Solvay Conferences, whose participants included luminaries such as Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Marie Curie, Henri Poincaré, and (then only 32 years old) Albert Einstein. A later conference would include Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Erwin Schrödinger.

He was two times elected to the Belgian Senate and appointed Minister of State at the end of his life. Solvay, New York, the location of the first Solvay process plant in the United States, is named after him.

Solvay died at Ixelles and is interred there in the Ixelles Cemetery.

The portrait of participants to the first Solvay Conference in 1911. Ernest Solvay is the third seated from the left. N.B. It is funny to note that, for some reasons, Solvay wasn't present at the time the photo was taken, so his photo was cut from an other one and pasted onto this one for the official release. In a time when no digital imaging editing tool existed, hence, the larger head ...

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