Carl Bosch

Born in 1874, Bosch was a German chemist and engineer who took Fritz Haber's lab-scale ammonia synthesis and made it work at industrial pressure and temperature — a problem most thought unsolvable. The Haber–Bosch process went live in 1913 and changed agriculture forever, enabling mass fertilizer production and, less cheerfully, explosives on a new scale. He co-founded IG Farben, which became the largest chemical company on earth. Later he co-developed the Bosch-Meiser urea process. He won the Nobel in Chemistry and died in 1940, having engineered the chemical backbone of modern food supply.