Robert Waley Cohen

Sir Robert Waley Cohen KBE (born September 8, 1877 in London , † November 27, 1952 ) was a British chemist at the Royal Dutch Shell Company.

Life and activity

Earlier years

Cohen comes from one of the leading Anglo-Jewish families. In 1901 he joined Shell Transport and Trading Company Ltd. the brothers Marcus and Samuel Samuel. He had previously earned a degree in chemistry from Cambridge University .

Shell Transport and Royal Dutch formed the Asiatic Petroleum Company, Ltd. in 1903 . The two parent companies became holdings and have been merged since 1907, with Royal Dutch holding 60% and Shell Transport 40% of the shares. Waley Cohen was a member of the small founding group. He was concerned with the composition of petroleum and its efficiency in machines and he commissioned Humphrey Owen Jones (Cambridge) with the chemical investigation. Jones analyzed their crude oil from Borneo for Shell and proved for the first time that aromatic hydrocarbons also occur naturally in large quantities. The value of the gasoline, which had been classified as inferior up to then - the heavier it was, the better oil - rose immediately. Jones also showed 350 different compounds in this distillate .

First World War

From 1914 Waley Cohen worked for Shell with (Sir) Harry Ricardo , who developed gasoline and diesel engines , most recently gas turbines , for many years . Ricardo had convinced Waley Cohen, who was the managing director for fuel additives in World War I , that explosions were an essential property of gasoline, and he received various types of gasoline from him to test. The petrol made from Borneo oil again proved to be the best, hundreds of thousands of tons of which had previously been burned in the jungle, as it did not have the specific weight required up to that point .

As a replacement for horses, the world war increasingly led to the use of vehicles with mobile combustion engines and a correspondingly increased need for oil among the warring parties. Waley Cohen and Marcus Samuel were the only suppliers in Great Britain able to offer three essential oil products, the raw material of which Shell was producing in the Dutch East Indies and Borneo : aviation fuel from Sumatra , toluene for TNT production and Borneo gasoline with extremely low viscosity for fleet use. Operations in arctic waters.

Since TNT could not be produced in England, Wesley Cohen organized the secret dismantling and removal of Shell's toluene refinery in neutral Rotterdam on January 30, 1915 . Although the German intelligence service was informed, Germany torpedoed the wrong ship (the SS Moordrecht ) in the port of Rotterdam one day too late . Nine weeks later, the Portishead, Sumerset facility was in full operation, with another being duplicated in Barrow-in-Furness , Lancashire . Both supplied 80% of the TNT used by the British during the war. In retrospect, Lord Birkenhead counted winning the battle for toluene as one of the three decisive victories. If the supply problem had not been solved in this way, one would have had to resort to the synthesis from butanol , which had been developed by Chaim Weizmann .

From 1917 to 1919 Wesley Cohen was a petroleum advisor to the British War Office . He had previously started to load the water ballast tanks of the Shell ships with oil as well. In this way, 761 ships transported an additional 1 million tons of oil into the kingdom and to the front. He was also given a free hand to convert British cargo ships into tankers and use them. War supplies turned into a profitable business for Shell. Shortly after the war, the French General Commissioner for Petroleum stated that without shell "war possibly by the Allies could not have been won." Waley Cohen was for his part in the war course as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire to defeat Knight . His son Bernard Waley Cohen later rose to the hereditary nobility with the title Baronet , of Honymead.

The cooperation between Shell, represented by Wesley Cohen, and engine developer Harry Ricardo led to highly aromatic, high- octane aviation gasoline in 1919 and thus to the first Atlantic flight of a Vickers Vimy bomber by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown .

Palestine

Waley Cohen was a leader in the British Jewish community. Although he actively opposed the establishment of the State of Israel and Zionism , he participated in the economic development of Palestine . At his instigation, Shell established the Haifa oil refinery near the Kishon . Shell has a 23.75% stake in two oil pipelines; one from Kirkuk to Tripoli and another to Haifa, which he opened with his wife Alice in 1935. His wife died in a subsequent car accident.

Waley Cohen also founded the Palestine Corporation , which made various investments in Palestine. The Nesher Cement Company, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem , the Diamond Industry, the Union Bank (UBI), the Ihud Insurance Agencies, the Palestine Salt Company, the Levant Bonded Department Stores, the Agricultural Mortgage Company and others were founded.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Bob Weintraub, Negev Academic College of Engineering, Beersheva

literature

• R. Henriques: Sir Robert Waley Cohen 1877-1952 . Secker & Warburg . London. 1966