Ernest Solvay

Ernest Solvay was a Belgian chemist, industrialist and philanthropist, born in Rebecq in 1838. Illness prevented him from going to university, and he worked in his uncle's chemical factory from the age of twenty one. In 1861, with his brother Alfred, he developed the ammonia-soda process, also called the Solvay process, for making soda ash from brine and limestone, an improvement over the earlier Leblanc process. He founded Solvay and Cie, opened his first factory at Couillet in 1863 and patented the process in 1872. He funded the Institute for Sociology at the Free University of Brussels and began the Solvay Conferences in physics in 1911. He died in 1922.