BASF was pushed across the Rhine by a town worried about its smoke
BASF was founded in Mannheim in 1865, but the town council feared the chemical works would foul the air for residents. So the plant went up on the opposite bank of the Rhine, in Ludwigshafen, which remains the headquarters of what is now the world's largest chemical producer.
The business grew out of street lighting. Friedrich Engelhorn had built Mannheim's gasworks in 1861, and the coal tar it left behind contained aniline, the raw material for the new synthetic dyes that William Henry Perkin had shown possible in England in 1857. The name records that origin: Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik, the Baden aniline and soda factory. Its first research chief, Heinrich Caro, worked out how to make the red dye alizarin and filed a British patent on 25 June 1869, a single day before Perkin filed a nearly identical one, and the rivals struck a deal. Synthetic indigo took from 1880 to 1897 to reach the market, and by 1901 dyes made up about 80 percent of output.
The next leap came from the air. Fritz Haber and BASF's Carl Bosch developed a way to synthesise ammonia between 1908 and 1912, and from 1913 a plant at Oppau turned it into fertiliser. Chemistry also brought disaster: an explosion at Oppau in 1921 killed 565 people, the worst industrial accident in German history.
The darkest chapter followed the 1925 merger that created IG Farben, with BASF as the nominal survivor. The conglomerate worked closely with the Nazi regime, ran a vast chemical plant at Auschwitz, relied heavily on forced labour, and produced Zyklon B, the gas used in the death camps. The Allies dissolved IG Farben in 1945. BASF was refounded under its old name in 1952, led by Carl Wurster, a former Nazi Party member.
Postwar BASF rode Germany's economic miracle, inventing the foam plastic Styropor in 1951 and building plants on several continents. By 2019 it employed more than 117,000 people, while critics still fault its environmental record.
Source: BASF
