He was born in Riga (at that time Russia, today Latvia), as the son of master-cooper Gottfried Wilhelm Ostwald and Elisabeth Leuckel. He was ethnically a Baltic German. He graduated from the University of Tartu in 1875, he received his Ph.D. there in 1878 under the guidance of Carl Schmidt and taught at Tartu from 1875 to 1881 and Riga Polytechnicum from 1881 to 1887. In 1887, he moved to Leipzig where he worked for the rest of his life. Arthur Noyes was one of his fam students, was Willis Rodney Whitney.
He is usually credited with inventing the Ostwald process (patent 1902), used in the manufacture of nitric acid, although the basic chemistry had been patented some 64 years earlier by Kuhlmann, when it was probably of only academic interest due to the lack of a significant source of ammonia. That may have still been the state of affairs in 1902, although things were due to change dramatically in the second half of the decade as a result of Haber and Bosch's work on their nitrogen fixing process (completed by 1911 or 1913). The date 1908 (six years after the patent) is often given for the invention of the Ostwald process, and it may be that these developments motivated him to do additional work to commercialize the process in that time-frame. Alternatively, six years might simply have been the bureaucratic interval between filing the patent and the time it was granted.

The combination of these two breakthroughs soon led to more economical and larger-scale production of fertilizers and explosives which Germany was to find itself in desperate need of during World War I. Ostwald also did significant work on dilution theory leading to his discovery of the law of dilution which is named after him.


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