Ignacy Moscicki
1867-1946), Polish politician and chemist, president of Poland (1926-1939).
Ignacy Mościcki was born on December 1, 1867 in Mierzanów (a small town near Ciechanów, Poland). After completing basic school in Warsaw he studied chemistry at Riga Polytechnicum. There he joined the Polish underground leftist organisation Proletariat.
Upon finishing his studies he returned to Warsaw, but the tsarist secret police threatened him with life imprisonment in Siberia and forced him to emigrate to London in 1892. In 1896 he was offered the seat of assistant at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg. There he patented the method of cheap industrial production of nitric acid. In 1912 he moved to Lemberg to take the command post at the Chair of Physical Chemistry and Technical Electrochemistry of Lwów Technical University.
In 1925 he was elected the rector of this University, but soon he moved to Warsaw to continue his studies at the Warsaw University of Technology.
After Piłsudski's coup d'etat, on June 4, 1926, he was elected the president of Poland by the National Assembly. He remained the president of Poland until September 1939, when he was interned in Romania and forced by France to resign. He passed his office to Władysław Raczkiewicz. In December 1939 he was released and allowed to move to Switzerland, where he remained during World War II. Died in his house near Geneva on October 2, 1946.
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