Carl Bosch combined in himself the scientist and the industrialist. He studied mechanical engineering and metallurgy at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg from 1894 to 1896 and transferred to the University of Leipzig in 1896, where he obtained his doctorate in 1898. A year later, he joined the Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (BASF) in Ludwigshafen.
Bosch found his real major field of work when BASF took over the high-pressure catalytic synthesis of ammonia developed by Fritz Haber in 1908, and Bosch was commissioned to develop the invention into an industrial-scale process. He succeeded in producing and purifying the two gases required for ammonia synthesis at low cost and gradually developed ever larger industrial production units.
Bosch was appointed to the Board of Executive Directors of BASF in 1916 and became Chairman of the Board of Management of I.G. Farben in 1919. In 1935, he became Chairman of the Supervisory Board. In 1931, together with Friedrich Bergius, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for services to the discovery and development of high-pressure chemical processes.