Great lives
Fritz Haber, the chemist who fed the world and armed the trenches
11 min
The man who learned to pull fertilizer from thin air, saving billions from starvation, then pioneered chemical warfare — one of history's most morally tangled legacies.
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Show notes
Exploration of the Haber-Bosch process and its role in the 20th-century population boom.
The ethical dilemma of Fritz Haber's dual legacy as a savior and a war criminal.
The chemical mechanisms of nitrogen fixation and the development of chlorine gas.
The tragic life of Clara Immerwahr and her opposition to chemical warfare.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Nitrogen Paradox2 min
- 3Bread from the Air3 min
- 4The Father of Chemical Warfare3 min
- 5The Nobel Contradiction and Exile2 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- How do you solve a problem like Fritz Haber?
- The Man Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions (Clean Version) — Veritasium
- BBC Audio | The Forum | Fertiliser and poison gas: The legacy of chemist Fritz Haber
- Fritz Haber: The Nobel Prize winner who fed billions and killed millions with one revolutionary discovery | - The Times of India
- Fritz Haber - Wikipedia
- Fritz Haber | Science History Institute
- How do you solve a problem like Fritz Haber? - Transcript
- "A Grim Enemy For Reasons We Do Not Yet Comprehend" — The Rest Is Science — Podcast Rex
- "A Grim Enemy For Reasons We Do Not Yet Comprehend" | The Rest Is Science | rova
- Stinky white gold, Haber-Bosch, and ‘peecycling’: How fertilizer shapes our world - American Chemical Society
- How fertiliser helped feed the world - BBC News
- Fritz Haber – Biographical - NobelPrize.org
- Haber process
- Steven Shapin · Tod aus Luft: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber
- Fritz Haber - Nobel Lecture
- History of the Haber process
- The industrialization of the Haber-Bosch process
- Arsenal Of Chemistry: The Haber Bosch Process and the Great War
- Historical Group
- Fritz Haber’s Ammonia Process: The Effect on World War I and on Contemporary Agriculture INTRODUCTION Nitrates are indispensable for agricultural use and explosive manufacture. In 1898, William Crookes, a prominent English chemist and physicist in his time, warned the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the limit of global food production was on the horizon unless scientists developed a synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. At that time, essentially all nitrates came from mines in Chile. When World War I began, the British navy controlled of the seas, making it impossible for Germany to import Chilean nitrates. In addition to being vital for crop production during World War I, nitrates were also essential to manufacture explosives such as dynamite, varieties of gunpowder, high explosive bursting charges for shells, torpedoes and depth bombs using trinitrotoluene (T.N.T.), and nitro starch used in hand grenades. THE HABER PROCESS (Incomplete) Around 1910, Fritz Haber, a professor of chemistry at the University of Karlsruthe built a laboratory reactor for reacting nitrogen and hydrogen to make ammonia at high pressure. Nitrogen and hydrogen gas are combined at 450-500º Celsius and 250 atmospheres with porous iron catalyst Fe3O4. Under high pressure and medium temperature, nitrogen and hydrogen gas
- The Synthetic Nitrogen Industry in World War I: Its Emergence and Expansion | Springer Nature Link
- How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world
- Chemical Warfare’s Home Front | Elizabeth Kolbert | The New York Review of Books
- In 1909, the chemist Fritz Haber pulled a few millilitres of ammonia out of ordinary air in a Karlsruhe laboratory, and the reaction he started now supplies the nitrogen atoms in roughly half the protein inside every human body alive today
- Haber process
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