William Crookes had issued his challenge. Fixing nitrogen in the laboratory to make synthetic fertilizer was now the holy grail of chemistry. But it wasn’t going to be easy.
No country knew how important it was to solve the riddle of synthetic fertilizer more than Germany. At the turn of the 20th century, 58 million people lived in Germany, most in densely populated urban centers. German farmers did what they could with what they had, meticulously recycling decaying plants and animal manure. But it wasn’t nearly enough. Germany had to import another source of natural fertilizer; without it, the country wouldn’t have survived. To get it, German sailors had to cross an ocean.
In South America, the Atacama Desert is rich in natural nitrogen in the form of nitrates. (Nitrates, which are a combination of one nitrogen atom with three oxygen atoms, are an excellent source of natural nitrogen.) Chile owned it. By 1900, Chile was responsible for two-thirds of all the natural fertilizer used on the planet; Germany used a third of that. So great was its need that, by the turn of the century, Germany had imported more than 350,000 tons of nitrates; by 1912, the number rose to 900,000 tons. As a consequence of its reliance on Chilean nitrates, Germany was particularly vulnerable during war—and WWI was just around the corner. Foreign navies could prevent German ships from traveling to Chile, essentially starving German citizens.
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HABER’S RISE AT THE University of Karlsruhe was meteoric.
In 1896, two years after he entered the university, Haber wrote a book about physical chemistry that launched his career and enabled his promotion to assistant professor. In 1898, the year of William Crookes’s famous speech, Haber wrote a second book that married theoretical and practical chemistry and assured his next promotion. In 1905, he wrote a third book about thermodynamics that catapulted him to a directorship. He was only 37 years old.
Haber dedicated his third book to his wife, Clara, whom he had known since his student days in Breslau and whom he had married four years earlier. Together they had one son, Hermann. Clara was exceptional: Born into a family of chemists, she was the only woman to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Breslau and one of the first women in Germany ever to receive a Ph.D. But marriage didn’t suit her. A victim of the gender discrimination of her time, she was transformed from a bright, young scientist to a dispirited housewife, forced to watch her husband ignore both her and their son in his quest for fame. “Fritz is so scattered,” she said, “if I didn’t bring to him his son every once in a while, he wouldn’t even know that he was a father.”
For Haber, on the other hand, the University of Karlsruhe was bursting with possibilities. The university had an excellent relationship with Badische Anilin & Soda-Fabrik (BASF), a large chemical company just a stone’s throw down the Rhine River. If Haber wanted to find practical applications for his work, the association with BASF was perfect. More important, when it came to chemistry and physics, Germany was the place to be. Under Kaiser Wilhelm II, German professors formulated the most brilliant theories, German scientists made the most important discoveries, and German industries had the most advanced facilities. As a result, German academics won more Nobel Prizes than their counterparts in other countries. When Adolf Hitler rose to power, all of this would disappear. But at the time that Fritz Haber entered the University of Karlsruhe, if one were searching for the holy grail of chemistry, Germany would have been the place to find it.
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ALTHOUGH GERMANS had sailed halfway around the world to get their nitrogen, they really didn’t have to travel that far to find it. Air is 79 percent nitrogen. Indeed, seven tons of nitrogen circulate above every square yard of Earth’s surface. The problem, however, is that nitrogen in the air doesn’t exist as a single atom (N). It exists as two atoms coupled together (N2) in a triple bond that is essentially unbreakable—the strongest chemical bond in nature. Although N2 in the air can be used to inflate a million balloons, it cannot be used to grow a single stalk of corn.
N2 is described in chemistry books as odorless, colorless, nonflammable, nonexplosive, nontoxic, and nonreactive. The key word is “nonreactive.” N2 is inert, unavailable, dead. If it is to have any biological use—like forming the amino acids, proteins, enzymes, DNA, and RNA of life—then it has to be broken down into two separate atoms. Only then can nitrogen link to hydrogen to form ammonia (NH3) or to oxygen to form nitrates (NO3). Either of these forms can be used in soil to provide nitrogen to crops.
Because N2 isn’t commonly broken down by nature, it took an unnatural process to do it—in a sense, an act against nature. In 1909, when Fritz Haber became the first person to discover a commercially feasible way to break N2 apart, more than 3,000 articles had been published on the subject. None of them had provided an answer. The planet’s stores of nitrogen were slowly depleting. Time was running out.
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THE FORMULA is simple:
N2 + 3H2 2NH3
Reading from left to right, two paired nitrogen atoms combine with three paired hydrogen atoms to form two molecules of ammonia. Ammonia, Haber knew, would be perfect as a synthetic fertilizer.
To force the equation from left to right, Haber used extremely high temperatures and pressures. In 1904, he found that only 0.005 percent of the nitrogen that he had started with on the left side of the equation had ended up as ammonia on the right side—far less than was commercially practical. To help increase yields, Haber tried a variety of catalysts to speed up the reaction: metals like nickel and manganese that provided platforms on which nitrogen and hydrogen atoms were more readily exchanged. But nothing worked. Haber concluded that creating ammonia from nitrogen in the air was impractical. So he gave up. But not before publishing his findings in a leading chemistry journal.
Haber’s publication drew the attention of Walther Nernst, the first professor of physical chemistry at the University of Göttingen and a giant in the field. Nernst had spent much of his academic life working on a theory of heat that would later be known as the third law of thermodynamics, an accomplishment for which he won the Nobel Prize. Nernst was upset with Haber’s publication because it had contradicted his own theories. So he asked one of his assistants to repeat the experiment, finding yields that were even lower than Haber had published. Angry, Nernst immediately wrote Haber a letter to express his concern.
Haber took Nernst’s criticisms to heart and repeated the experiments, finding that Nernst was right. Both men had now done the same experiments and reached the same conclusion. Synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen in the air was far too inefficient. But Walther Nernst wouldn’t let things go. Considering Haber’s first publication an affront, he was intent on humiliating him. In May 1907, at an international meeting of the Bunsen Society, Nernst called out Fritz Haber. “I would like to suggest that Professor Haber now employ a method that is certain to produce truly precise values,” he said. Later, Nernst called Haber’s findings “stark unrichtigen Zahlen”—“strongly inaccurate”—and said that fixing nitrogen in the laboratory was a fool’s game. Haber was hurt and angry that Nernst had chosen to criticize him in front of his colleagues. Intent on recovering his reputation, he took to the task of creating ammonia from air with a vengeance.
Following the Bunsen Society meeting, a series of events allowed Fritz Haber to accomplish what appeared to be impossible. First, a young chemist from England named Robert Le Rossignol came to his laboratory. Le Rossignol was a skillful and inventive experimenter, eventually designing a small tabletop apparatus made of quartz and iron capable of withstanding temperatures as high as 1832°F, hot enough to melt copper, and pressures as high as 3,000 pounds per square inch, strong enough to crush a submarine. Second, Haber found a catalyst to speed up the reaction: osmium, a rare metal used as a filament in lightbulbs. Third, Haber found a way to cool down ammonia quickly so that it didn’t burn up in high heat. Finally, and most important, Haber’s mentor at Karlsruhe, Carl Engler, persuaded BASF to fund Haber’s experiments; if they worked, BASF would own the pat
ents and Haber would have a commercial partner.
Haber and Le Rossignol tinkered with the fittings and tried different temperatures and pressures. Finally, in March 1909, they had a glimpse of success. Haber was ecstatic. “Come down, you have to see how the liquid ammonia is running out!” he shouted to a colleague, who remembered, “I can still see it. There was about a cubic centimeter of ammonia. It was fantastic.” It wasn’t much—about a fifth of a teaspoon—but it was a start. Within a few months, Haber and Le Rossignol’s apparatus was producing ammonia round the clock.
On July 2, 1909, BASF sent two representatives to visit Fritz Haber’s laboratory: Carl Bosch, chief research engineer, and Alwin Mittasch, a chemist and catalyst expert. Unfortunately, one of Haber’s assistants had been too forceful in tightening a seal, which started to leak during the demonstration. Bosch waited while they tried to fix it. Hours passed. Bosch started to look at his watch; then he left. Mittasch stayed behind. After the apparatus was fixed and the reaction restarted, the machine functioned perfectly, making three ounces of ammonia during the five-hour demonstration. The output was logarithmically better than before. Instead of yields of 0.005 percent, they were now around 8 percent. Mittasch was convinced these higher yields were commercially feasible. He drove back to BASF to tell Bosch the good news.
A few ounces of ammonia produced by a few men in a minor university in Karlsruhe, Germany, would soon change the world. And it would make Fritz Haber a very rich man. But there would be a price to pay.
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SCALING UP WASN’T going to be easy. BASF now had to convert a tabletop apparatus into an industry. The man who did it was Carl Bosch.
Bosch was only 35 years old when he took charge of the project. The son of a gas and plumbing supplier in Cologne, Bosch had had the run of his father’s workshop. As a child, he removed the finish from his parents’ bed because he wanted to see the wood underneath. Then, piece by piece, he took apart his mother’s sewing machine to see how it worked. As a young man, he frequently visited his father’s factory, learning about soldering, pipe fitting, machining, woodworking, and metallurgy—all skills that would come in handy years later.
Ten months after Haber’s demonstration, Carl Bosch built a small prototypic unit in Ludwigshafen, a village not far from Karlsruhe. The plant officially opened on May 18, 1910. Haber’s two-foot-high tabletop apparatus had become a 26-foot-high megamachine. Within two months, the unit had produced more than 2,000 pounds of ammonia. By the beginning of January 1911, it was producing more than 8,000 pounds a day. Bosch then moved the operation a little farther down the Rhine to Oppau.
The plant at Oppau, which officially opened in September 1913, was the first of its kind. Costing $100 million, Oppau housed more than 10,000 workers, included a shipping system with its own railroad, boasted miles of piping and tubing, and centered on locomotive-size compressors that could withstand levels of heat and pressure never before seen in this industry. The research laboratory, which was five stories high, contained 250 chemists and a thousand assistants. Haber and Le Rossignol’s experiments were now conducted at an industrial level. BASF chemists tested 4,000 different catalysts in 20,000 separate experiments. By the end of the year, the plant at Oppau, which operated 24 hours a day, was producing 60,000 tons of ammonia a year! As far as Germany was concerned, Chilean nitrates were now obsolete.
For his efforts, Carl Bosch became the first person ever to win a Nobel Prize for commercializing a technology he didn’t invent. The process, however, was not without its tragedies. In 1921, an explosion at Oppau killed more than 500 people.
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FOR HIS REMARKABLE DISCOVERY, Fritz Haber was awarded, feted, and knighted by universities, professional societies, and royalty throughout Europe. The Soviet Union elected him to its National Academy of Sciences. The American Academy of Arts & Sciences elected him an honorary foreign member.
When the dust settled, Haber knew it was time to move out of Karlsruhe and into Germany’s cosmopolitan and intellectual center: Berlin. The offer was impossible to resist. Haber was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, given a fabulous salary, allotted 300,000 marks a year for operating expenses, provided a villa for himself and his family, and awarded an endowed chair at the University of Berlin. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was located in a suburb of Berlin called Dahlem, was the start of something new in Germany—a basic science institute funded solely by the federal government. At its peak, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science operated 38 such research institutes throughout the country and employed more than a thousand scientists and 11 Nobel Prize winners. The brightest star in the center of this research galaxy was Fritz Haber’s institute in Dahlem.
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OTHER COUNTRIES MIMICKED Bosch’s process. By 1963, about 300 ammonia plants were in operation and more than 40 were under construction. Today, about 130 million tons of nitrogen are removed from the air and spread across the earth as fertilizer. More than three billion people alive today—and billions more in the future—owe their existence to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. Never before have so many people enjoyed so much food.
Perhaps no one recognized the importance of the Haber-Bosch process more than Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for launching the green revolution. Borlaug had created new species of wheat and rice. But he knew the real hero of the story. “If the high-yielding dwarf wheat and rice varieties are the catalysts that have ignited the green revolution,” he said in his acceptance speech, “chemical fertilizer is the fuel that has powered its forward thrust.” During the past hundred years, the Haber-Bosch process has remained essentially unchanged, and ammonia is the most synthesized chemical on Earth.
No country has demonstrated the power of the Haber-Bosch process more than China.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon crossed “the bamboo curtain” and visited China. With him was James Finneran, a senior executive from the M. W. Kellogg Company. At the time, China was the most extensive recycler of human and animal waste in the world. Every ounce of natural nitrogen was put onto every piece of cultivable land. It was simply not possible for China to produce more food than it was producing. But it wasn’t enough. Peasants began eating their livestock, wild vegetables, soup made from grass, and bark stripped from trees; in some regions, cannibalism was reported. By 1961, an estimated 30 million Chinese had died from starvation. Those who had survived ate rice and a few vegetables; meat was rare; food was rationed. Worse, the population in China was increasing at a rate of ten million a year.
The M. W. Kellogg Company had constructed the world’s most efficient ammonia manufacturing plant. Finneran had accompanied Nixon to China because he wanted to help local industrialists build a plant of their own, assuming they would probably build one. They built 13. Within a few years, Chinese fertilizer production doubled; farmers grew massively greater amounts of crops, enough to feed not only people, but also food animals. Meat became plentiful. By 1989, China was the largest producer and consumer of synthetic fertilizer in the world. And, although China is home to one-fifth of the world’s population, malnutrition is no longer a problem. Obesity is the problem. In 1982, 10 percent of China’s population was obese (weighing 35 percent or more above ideal body weight). By the early 1990s, that number had climbed to 15 percent. Today, more than 30 percent of people living in Beijing are overweight, and childhood obesity has become a national concern.
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IN 1924, FIVE YEARS AFTER he had won the Nobel Prize for this discovery, Fritz Haber spoke at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, extolling the virtues of science. “The banker and the lawyer, the industrialist and the merchant, despite their leading positions in life, are only administrative officials,” he said. “The sovereign is natural science. Its progress determines the measure of prosperity of man; its cultivation is the seed from which the welfare of future generations grow.” But scientists don’t work in isolation. And s
cience unfettered has a darker side.
The largest nitrogen-producing plant in the United States is located in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Every day the plant consumes a million dollars worth of natural gas, boils 30,000 tons of water from a local river into steam, and produces 5,000 tons of ammonia (2 million tons a year). Every day these 5,000 tons of ammonia are loaded onto railcars, placed onto barges, floated down the Mississippi River, and sprinkled onto corn and wheat fields across the land. But not all of the nitrogen contained in ammonia ends up in crops. Only about a third of the nitrogen layered onto a cornfield, for instance, ends up in a kernel of corn. The rest washes into streams and leaches into groundwater.
The Gulf of Mexico, located next to the Louisiana ammonia plant, is a perfect example of what can happen when no one is watching. Every year about 1.5 million tons of nitrogen are dumped into the Gulf. This excess nitrogen has caused an overgrowth of algae that clouds the water and chokes off oxygen and sunlight to other species, like fish and mollusks. Algal overgrowth has killed streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s not just the fish that are dying. The birds that eat the fish are dying, too.
The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now the size of New Jersey and is growing. Worse, more than a 150 smaller dead zones have been identified throughout the world. The Baltic Sea north of Germany is one of the most polluted marine ecosystems on the planet; in the 1990s, the Baltic cod industry collapsed. The Thames, Rhine, Meuse, and Elbe Rivers in Europe also contain more than a hundred times the amount of synthetic nitrogen that is considered safe. Similar problems are occurring in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and China’s two largest rivers: the Huang He and Yangtze. Algae-producing harmful toxins have also been found in the Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound, and San Francisco Bay. In fairness, all this excess nitrogen doesn’t come solely from nitrogen fertilizer placed on land. It also comes from manure generated from food animals. But those animals are invariably fed with crops grown with synthetic fertilizer.
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