In my previous article, we went over one of the reasons why Nitrogen is so important (living organisms have to have it to make proteins to live and grow) and where most of the “extra” usable Nitrogen can be found (animal waste). There is, however, another, extremely important, piece to the equation of why Nitrogen is so important. Yes, it is necessary to make fertilizers for crops. It is also the primary ingredient in explosives. Remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City? The extremely powerful bomb he used was made mostly of high-nitrogen fertilizer. So, not only is usable (remember, all that nitrogen in the atmosphere is N2, and not directly usable) nitrogen necessary to support agriculture, it is also necessary to make bombs and bullets, and you can’t have a good war without lots of bombs and bullets.
Source: UCAR Center for Science Education
All this demand for nitrates (useable nitrogen-containing compounds) had all the industrialized countries of the world searching everywhere for good sources of nitrogen. Caves and bird nesting grounds were usually the best places, because birds (and bats, in caves) create lots of high-nitrogen waste. In most places, caves and bird nesting grounds are pretty limited. There are (or were), however, a few really good options. There are a string of islands off the western coast of South America where millions of birds have been living and breeding for centuries. They’ve created a lot of waste, called guano. Even better, it hardly ever rains on these islands, so the guano doesn’t wash away and it accumulated in many places into layers tens or even hundreds of feet deep. When the countries of industrialized world (primarily Europe) discovered these nitrogen-rich deposits of bird poop, they started mining it like coal and shipping it home. Countries actually went to war with each other over access to these islands covered with bird poop and other nitrate deposits in South America back in the nineteenth century.
The Guano Islands, and a few other sources of nitrates scattered here and there, supplied most of the nitrate needs of the more developed world for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, starting with the Crimean War in the 1850s and the American Civil War in the 1860s, we started getting a lot better at war, and the need for explosives to supply them started to expand rapidly. By early twentieth century, nitrate supplies were more and more difficult to find. Then World War 1 rolled around. In WWI, the use of machine guns and artillery increased massively, as did the need for gunpowder and explosives to supply them. The remaining South American nitrate supplies were mostly controlled by the Allies, so German access to those supplies stopped when the war started. There is a pretty good school of thought that suggests that WWI would have had to essentially end after two or three years because both sides would have eventually run out of explosives as naturally-occurring nitrate sources ran out. We would have also run out of fertilizer for our crops, but that’s no big deal, compared to the never-ending need to blow each other up efficiently.
So, here’s where the most important man you’ve never heard of comes in. Fritz Haber was a German chemist. Germany has always produced a lot of good chemists and Fritz Haber was very good, indeed. He worked on many projects during his career before the war, one of which was trying to discover a practical method for extracting a usable form of nitrogen from the N2 form of nitrogen found in the atmosphere (remember that very strong bond between the two nitrogen atoms as it is found in the atmosphere that we mentioned in the previous article). He succeeded in developing a workable process in 1910, producing ammonia from the nitrogen in the air. The chemical formula for ammonia is NH3, meaning a single atom of nitrogen bound to three atoms of hydrogen. That single nitrogen is easily used, both by living organisms and industrially, as a source of usable nitrogen. That’s why today we see all those tanks of ammonia being pulled down the road and across the farm fields in the spring—it’s a terrific high-nitrogen fertilizer. A German engineer by the name of Carl Bosch took Haber’s process and expanded it to an industrial scale in 1913. Both men were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work. Today, the process is called the Haber-Bosch process and it is used to produce around 500 million tons of ammonia a year. Ammonia production is so important that approximately 2% of all the electricity used, worldwide, is used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There are lots of real and potential consequences to Fritz Haber’s discovery. There are currently about almost 8 billion people living on the Earth, with about 40% of that total living in China and India. Without the use of fertilizers, some estimates say that, were we to plant every square foot of the land in the world that could potentially grow crops, it could only support about 4 billion people. That means that about half of the people currently alive (and billions more who have lived and died since about 1915) would not be here without Fritz Haber. Most of the other 4 billion would be hanging by a thread. Famine would be a constant specter, worldwide, with millions dying every time there was a poor growing season. It’s a certainty that the standard of living for much of humanity would be substantially lower than it is today. More than half of the nitrogen atoms contained in the proteins and other molecules in your own body were produced with the Haber-Bosch process. There are also some other considerations. It is possible that Germany would have run out of munitions by about 1915 or 1916 without the nitrates made available by Haber’s process and would have had to surrender. However, they were able to keep fighting until 1918. The destruction wrought by those extra years of war was, at least partially, responsible for the harsh terms the Allies imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Those harsh terms can, with some pretty good justification, be cited as a pretty significant cause of WWII, which resulted in somewhere between 50 and 80 million deaths and untold human misery. So, you could also put some of the blame for WWII on Fritz Haber, if you chose to.
Image of Fritz Haber is in the public domain
One final tidbit on Fritz Haber: after the war, he continued to work as a chemist, working on all sorts of projects, like pesticides. His lab developed a cyanide-based pesticide that was patented under the trade name “Cyclone”. It was used around the world to kill insects over large areas, like orange groves and warehouses. A different formulation (that Haber had nothing to do with) of it eventually found another use that you’ve probably heard about. The German word for “cyclone” is Zyklon. Zyklon-B was eventually used in the Nazi death camps to kill over a million people in the gas chambers. Fritz Haber, who died in 1934, long before WWII and the Holocaust, by the way, was Jewish.
Scientific discoveries can lead to great good and, sometimes, great evil, but the process of discovery itself is neither. It is how we use our knowledge that is good or evil. Again, this is why we all need to know enough about science that we can be part of the discussion about how we, as a society, will use and control our science.
If you would like to learn more about Fritz Haber (and there is a lot more to learn), there is (among several others) a really good, really readable biography of him, called “Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare”, by Daniel Charles.