Ludwig Mond Gave Metal Wings

Ludwig Mond (1839-1909) founded Britain's ICI.

Ludwig Mond was another wealth maker who changed chemistry and in so doing, changed the world. Am I giving him too much credit?  Perhaps. Mond discovered nickel tetracarbonyl--an insidious poison--and turned its making into a process for refining ultra pure nickel--mostly Canadian nickel from the Sudbury Basin. Such nickel went into steel to make armor plating for ships. I'm sure that some still sits in the sunken battleship USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.* Hardened steel armor was also the reason the US Treasury had to pull nickel from circulation during World War II, replacing it with less precious silver. link

Mond found (by accident) that nickel combines with four molecules of carbon monoxide to give nickel tetracarbonyl,
Ni(CO)₄:
 

Nickel tetracarbonyl is volatile and can be distilled. In a sense, the four carbon monoxides bear a metal atom aloft. To paraphrase Lord Kelvin: Mond gave wings to metals (I used Kelvin's metaphor to describe how fluorine "gave uranium wings" back here).
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*Kruppstahl as it turns out. I suspected this after having seen one of the Arizona's turrets still half submerged in warm seawater after nearly 70 years!