• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 582 0

is written in nitrogen ink. (This is why scientists speak of nitrogen as supplying life’s quality, while carbon provides the quantity.) But the supply of usable nitrogen on earth is limited. Although earth’s atmosphere is about 80 percent nitrogen, all those atoms are tightly paired, nonreactive, and therefore useless; the nineteenth-century chemist Justus von Liebig spoke of atmospheric nitrogen’s “indifference to all other substances.” To be of any value to plants and animals, these self-involved nitrogen atoms must be split and then joined to atoms of hydrogen. Chemists call this process of taking atoms from the atmosphere and combining them into molecules useful to living things “fixing” that element. Until a German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn this trick in 1909, all the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants (such as peas or alfalfa or locust trees) or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightning, which can break nitrogen bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility.

Vaclav Smil, a geographer who has written a fascinating book about Fritz Haber called Enriching the Earth, pointed out that “there is no way to grow crops and human bodies without nitrogen.” Before Fritz Haber’s invention the sheer amount of life earth could support—the size of crops and therefore the number of human bodies—was limited by the amount of nitrogen that bacteria and lightning could fix. By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt. The same recognition by Chinese scientists a few decades later is probably what compelled China’s opening to the West: After Nixon’s 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would probably have starved.

This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-Bosch process (Carl Bosch gets the credit for commercializing Haber’s idea) for fixing nitrogen is the most important invention of the twentieth century. He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber’s invention. We can easily imagine a world without computers or electricity, Smil points out, but without synthetic fertilizer billions of people would never have been born. Though, as these numbers suggest, humans may have struck something of a Faustian bargain with nature when Fritz Haber gave us the power to fix nitrogen.

Fritz Haber? No, I’d never heard of him either, even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920 for “improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind.” But the reason for his obscurity has less to do with the importance of his work than the ugly twist of his biography, which recalls the dubious links between modern warfare and industrial agriculture. During World War I, Haber threw himself into the German war effort, and his chemistry kept alive Germany’s hopes for victory. After Britain choked off Germany’s supply of nitrates from Chilean mines, an essential ingredient in the manufacture of explosives, Haber’s technology allowed Germany to continue making bombs from synthetic nitrate. Later, as the war became mired in the trenches of France, Haber put his genius for chemistry to work developing poison gases—ammonia, then chlorine. (He subsequently developed Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler’s concentration camps.) On April 22, 1915, Smil writes, Haber was “on the front lines directing the first gas attack in military history.” His “triumphant” return to Berlin was ruined a few days later when his wife, a fellow chemist sickened by her husband’s contribution to the war effort, used Haber’s army pistol to kill herself. Though Haber later converted to Christianity, his Jewish background forced him to flee Nazi Germany in the thirties; he died, broken, in a Basel hotel room in 1934. Perhaps because the history