Adolf Frank Collection

The bulk of the material in this collection deals with the latter part of Adolf Frank's career, when he was active as a chemical consultant. The single largest part of the collection is material pertaining to the Cyanid Gesellschaft (Series II), including minutes of the Board of Director's meetings, yearly financial statements and an extensive correspondence of Frank with and about the corporation and its foreign subsidiaries. The material contains much information on finances, laboratory as well as engineering practices, and other aspects of the early twentieth-century chemical industry, especially on early attempts at the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen (Series III). There is also business related material concerning other companies, mainly the Vereinigte Chemische Werke (Series IX).

There is also considerable material on the Charlottenburg Municipal Gas Works (Series V). The matters discussed rang from personnel policy, the purchase of new equipment, and problems of environmental protection. A large portion of Frank's consulting work dealt with waste products and their governmental regulations, especially in his contracts with the cellulose industry (Series IV).

The collection holds also interesting material on the relationship between science, government and industry. During World War I, Frank was involved in a scheme to expropriate Belgium's phosphate-ore fields for use in producing fertilizer according to a process that he had invented himself (Series VI). There is also correspondence (Series VIII) and press clippings (Series XI) on the case of professor Paul Wagner, an agricultural chemist, who was accused of taking money from the potash syndicate and falsifying experimental results in their favor to boost fertilizer sales.

The correspondence of Adolf Frank's son Albert includes information on the chemical industry after World War I (Series IX). There are two interesting memoranda on the French chemical industry and the conditions of doing business in France during the late 1920s. There is also correspondence with I.G. Farben on the possibility of joint projects between that company and the Bayerische Stickstoff-Werke.

The collection also houses material on the practice of chemical research and its industrial application with a number of laboratory notebooks, covering the period from the 1870s until the first decades of the twentieth century (Series X); patent files of chemical processes (Series VII); and plans for industrial facilities (Series XII). There are also numerous clippings on the chemical industry; on political events during World War I; and on the immediate postwar era (Series XI). In addition, the collection holds several of Adolf and Albert Frank's birth and university certificates (Series XII). A selection of published and unpublished manuscripts ( Series I and XI) by Adolf Frank and personal papers by Adolf and Albert Frank (Series I) round out the collection.