Fritz Haber Quotes

In peace-time the scientist belongs to humanity, in war-time to his fatherland.

In 1909 Carl Bosch perfected a process invented by Fritz Haber which used methane and steam to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer on an industrial scale, replacing the massive quantities of bird poop that had previously been needed to return nitrogen to depleted soils. Those two chemists top the list of the 20th-century scientists who saved the greatest number of lives in history, with 2.7 billion.

The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen.

The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention.

During World War One, Germany was placed under blockade and suffered severe shortages of raw materials, in particular saltpetre, an essential ingredient in gunpowder and other explosives. The most important saltpetre deposits were in Chile and India; there were none at all in Germany. True, saltpetre could be replaced by ammonia, but that was expensive to produce as well. Luckily for the Germans, one of their fellow citizens, a Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber, had discovered in 1908 a process for producing ammonia literally out of thin air. When war broke out, the Germans used Haber’s discovery to commence industrial production of explosives using air as a raw material. Some scholars believe that if it hadn’t been for Haber’s discovery, Germany would have been forced to surrender long before November 1918.6 The discovery won Haber (who during the war also pioneered the use of poison gas in battle) a Nobel Prize in 1918. In chemistry, not in peace.

[Smil] estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process.

cultural leaders including Fritz Haber, Max Liebermann and Max Planck.

Llevar una oficina no es tan difícil, le dijo Just. Básicamente consiste en saber, en primer lugar, que entra; en segundo lugar, qué queda pendiente; en tercer lugar, qué asuntos han sido gestionados y están listos para salir; y en cuarto lugar, qué es lo que ya ha salido. Todos los asuntos deben encontrarse en una de estas cuatro etapas, y de este modo no se puede poner la excusa de que se ha traspapelado algún documento. Para cada transacción debe haber un registro, y de ese registro tienes que poder obtener inmediatamente una copia escrita. El mundo civilizado no podria existir sin su cohorte de escribientes, y estos a su vez no podrían existir si la civilización no requiriese tanto papeleo. - Yo no resistiria la vida si tuviera que que trabajar de escribiente, le dijo Fritz. - No debería existir ese tipo de trabajo. - Ni una revolución acabaría con él, le dijo Coelestin Just. - Habría escribientes al pie de la guillotina.

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.

Einstein’s closest friend was the brilliant chemist Fritz Haber, who turned his intellect to the invention of the poisonous gases that could be deployed in battle, thus playing his part in murdering and terrifying thousands of soldiers.15 The Germany of the early twentieth century was at the pinnacle of human culture: science, literature, scholarship, music. That it turned to conquest and large-scale murder gives the lie to the claim that higher culture is humanizing in itself.

In 1909 Fritz Haber, a professor of chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe, succeeded in synthesizing ammonia from its elements (fig. 4.4). He did that by taking nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from reacting glowing coke with water vapor and combining the two elements under high pressure in the presence of a metal (iron) catalyst. His research was supported by BASF, at that time the world’s leader in the production of industrial chemicals, and it was under the leadership of Carl Bosch, one of BASF’s most capable engineers, that Haber’s bench-top demonstration was converted rapidly into a full-scale industrial synthesis (fig. 4.4).

Further reading: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production, by Vaclav Smil Salt, Sugar and Fat, by Michael Moss Maise for the Gods: Unearthing the 9,000-Year History of Corn, by Michael Blake