Company
ActiveBASF
Ludwigshafen · Since 1865
Also absorbed into IG Farben, and reconstituted after the war. It remains one of the largest chemical companies in the world.
Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik was founded in Mannheim in 1865 and soon built its works across the river at Ludwigshafen, where the site could grow. The name says the business: aniline dyes and soda, the feedstocks of a chemical plant.
BASF's distinction was scale and the laboratory. The synthesis of indigo, achieved by the company after years of paid research, replaced a plantation crop with a vat. A firm had employed chemists long enough to erase an agricultural trade.
A city of pipes
Ludwigshafen was laid out as a single organism. One plant's waste was another's input. The jobs were operator, fitter, and the chemist who understood why a reaction had drifted. Housing, a fire brigade, and a hospital followed, as they did at Krupp, because a continuous process cannot wait for a town to catch up. The worker's skill was knowing a unit, not making an object from start to finish.
Broken up, and still there
BASF joined IG Farben in 1925 and was re-established after the war. Ludwigshafen is still the largest chemical complex of its kind. The company remains independent and one of the biggest chemical employers in the world. The indigo synthesis is the page's point: research, once it is a department, can abolish a distant job as thoroughly as a machine in the next room.
The work it organized
- Process operator
- Research chemist
- Fitter
- Plant firefighter
On the timeline
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