Ernest Gaston Joseph Solvay was a Belgian chemist, industrialist and philanthropist.
Born in Rebecq, he was prevented by his acute pleurisy 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 manufacturing of soda ash from brine and limestone . The process was an improvement over the earlier Leblanc process.
He founded the company Solvay & Cie and 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" or Institute for Sociology at the Free 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 Free 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, Maria Skłodowska-Curie, Henri Poincaré, and Albert Einstein. A later conference would include Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Erwin Schrödinger.
He was twice elected to the Belgian Senate for the Liberal Party and granted honorary title of Minister of State at the end of his life. Solvay, New York and Rosignano Solvay, the locations of the first Solvay process plants in the United States and in Italy, are also named after him.
Solvay died at Ixelles at the age of 84 and is buried in the Ixelles Cemetery.
Wikipedia
quoted by [Pierre Marage, Grégoire Wallenborn, The Solvay Councils and the Birth of Modern Physics, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1999, 3-764-35705-3]
“Science produces an incomparably lyrical state in this man.”
Héger and Lefébure, close friends of Solvay's, quoted by [Pierre Marage, Grégoire Wallenborn, The Solvay Councils and the Birth of Modern Physics, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1999, 3-764-35705-3]
