Ernst Berl papers

Ernst Berl (1877-1946) was born in Freudenthal, in a part of Upper Silesia that then belonged to Austria (present-day Czech Republic). In 1894, he began studies at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, and graduated in 1898 as a chemical engineer. Following military service, he returned to academia, earning a doctorate at the University of Zurich in 1901. Initially he served as a lecturer in chemical technology at that same university, but then began working in industry, helping developing synthetic fabrics. At the outbreak of World War I, he returned to Austria and worked for the government, developing explosives and chemical weapons. Following the war, he took an appointment as a professor of chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany, where he remained on the faculty until 1933, when the Nazis gained power in Germany, and Jewish faculty members were forced out of their positions. Berl and his family moved to the United States that same year, when he was offered a position on the faculty of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, where he remained until his retirement in 1945. During those decades, however, he was active as an inventor, patenting dozens of products for use in the chemical engineering, such as the Berl saddle, used in distillation devices.