Karl Ziegler

Born in November 1898, Karl Waldemar Ziegler spent his career chasing reactions most chemists avoided - free radicals, many-membered rings, compounds where metal met carbon. The breakthrough came with organometallic catalysts that controlled polymerization in ways no one had managed before, work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963 alongside Giulio Natta. The Nobel Committee cited how his compounds "paved the way for new and highly useful industrial processes" - understatement for materials that became ubiquitous. In 1960 he shared the Werner von Siemens Ring with Otto Bayer and Walter Reppe for advancing synthetic materials from lab bench to factory floor. He died in August 1973, decades into the plastic age he'd helped engineer.