Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Fritz Haber: The Best and Worst Chemist in History

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Fritz Haber is unquestionably one of the greatest chemists in history. He was a Nobel prize winner and his inventions have touched billions of lives. However, Haber is a two-sided coin. He has touched the lives of millions for the better, and he also touched the lives of millions for the worse. Learn more about Fritz Haber, perhaps the best and worst chemist in history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fritz-Hobber is unquestionably one of the greatest chemists in history. He was a Nobel Prize winner, and his inventions have touched billions of lives. However, Hobber is a two-sided coin. He has touched the lives of millions of people for the better, and he has also touched the lives of millions of people for the worse. Learn more about Fritz-Hobber, perhaps the best and worst chemist in history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I just wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow, the very first edition of the Everything Everywhere newsletter will be hitting inboxes around the world. The newsletter is an adjunct to the podcast, and it will be coming. covering similar subjects which don't make it onto the show. This includes links to great stories from around the world of archaeology, geography, with great articles about history, as well as news about technology, science, and mathematics.

I'll also be providing updates on past episodes, which it turns out there are quite a few. And I'll be sharing some personal updates as well as updates to next year's Everything Everywhere tour. If you haven't signed up yet, just go to everything-everywhere.com slash newsletter and confirm your subscription in the follow-up email. Once again, that's everything-everywhere.com slash newsletter or just click on the link in the show notes. People like their stories to be black and white. There are heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. This is a truth that professional wrestling has understood for a very long time. I mention this because Fritz-Hobber doesn't fit nicely into either category. If anything, you can say he has one foot firmly planted in each.

Fritz-Hauber was born in 1868 in what is today known as Vortzlov, Poland, but was then known as Brestlaw in the Kingdom of Prussia. He was born into a wealthy Jewish family, a fact that will become noteworthy later. His father Sigfried was a successful merchant who ran a company that primarily manufactured dies. His mother Paula died three weeks after childbirth. When Fritz was six years old, his father remarried a woman named Hedwig Hamburger, which I mention only because she sounds like, like she's a McDonald's character who should be the wife of Mayor McChese. Hubber went off to college over the objections of his father who wanted him to work at the family die factory. There, he studied chemistry, did a year of mandatory service in the German

army, and then returned to his studies. After he graduated, having done his thesis on reactions with the molecule perpranol, he returned to Breslau to work with his father. However, he and his father didn't get along very well, and Fritz decided to get a position in academia. He got his initial job at the University of Yana and then later at the University of Carl's Rule in 1894. It was at the University of Carl's Rule where he began research into electrochemistry, and eventually the work which first made him world renowned. But first I have to explain the problem that the world was facing. The world's population was growing rapidly in the early 20th century. The increasing need for food put greater demands on agriculture. The growth of agriculture was highly dependent

upon fertilizer which put nitrogen into the soil. The demand for fertilizer was increasing, but the supply was decreasing. Most fertilizer at the time was mined from guano deposits, and guano is a very finite resource. The majority of it was exported from South America. Many people recognized the problem that was facing the world. If the guano ran out, there wouldn't be any fertilizer, and without fertilizer, it would severely hinder the ability to grow crops. Historically, farmers had several techniques for putting nitrogen into the soil.

Crop rotation with legumes and animal fertilizer were two of the most common ways, but those techniques can't scale up for mechanized agriculture. Without solving the nitrogen problem, the world would be looking at severe famines. Nitrogen itself isn't rare. It's all around us. 78% of the Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen. The problem was getting atmospheric nitrogen into a form that could be used as fertilizer. Hobber's first big innovation was figuring out how to fixate atmospheric nitrogen.

Known as the Hobber process, or the Hobber Bosch process, it uses nitrogen from the air and methane under very high pressures to create ammonia. Haber first demonstrated this process in 1909 in a laboratory experiment where a few drops of ammonia were produced. By 1913, the technique had been industrialized by Carl Bosch, and they were producing tons of it per year. It's estimated that half of all the crops in the world today are fertilized by fertilizers created via the faber process, with over 100 million tons produced via this method every year. It's hard to stress just how important the fiber process is. Literally, our modern world couldn't exist, and the lives of billions of people depend on it.

Fritz-Hawber was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his work in this area. Despite the incredible benefits to humanity of the Hobber process, his Nobel Prize was controversial. That reason had to do with the other side of Fritz-Hobber. If helping to feed the world was his best side, then what he did next was his worst. Despite being born Jewish in what is today Poland, Haber very much identified as German. He converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, primarily to help his academic career. When World War I broke out,

Haber enthusiastically supported the German cause. He was one of 93 academics who signed a document called the Manifesto of the 93. Here are the first sentences of the manifesto. As representatives of German science and art, we hereby protest to the civilized world against the lies and calamities of which our enemies are endeavoring to stain the honor of Germany in her hard struggle for existence, in a struggle that has been forced upon her.

The Iron Mouth of Events has proved the untruth of the fictitious German defeats. Consequently, misrepresentation and columny are all the more eagerly at work. As heralds of truth, we raise our voices against these claims. Unquote. Haber joined the army and was promoted to the rank of captain. He was then assigned to be the head of the chemistry section of the Ministry of War. It was Fritz Haber, who almost single-handedly was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in World War I.

He didn't just take a passive role sitting behind a death. developing plans for new weapons, he took a quite active role. At the Second Battle of Iprra, on April 22nd, 1915, Hobber personally commanded the first use of chemical weapons in the war. The Germans released 171 tons of chlorine gas along a front 6.5 kilometers or 4 miles wide. It was called Operation Disinfectant. When the wind was right, the Germans opened up the valves on the tanks, and a giant mist of greenish-yellow chlorine gas moved across the battlefield. As this had never been used in combat before, the French soldiers on the other side didn't run. They didn't know what it was. They easily could have outrun the cloud on foot if they knew it was

about to happen. When it reached the Allied trench, men began coughing as no one had gas masks. No one knew that they would be needed. By the time the Allies retook the trenches that were filled with chlorine gas, they found perhaps the most horrific scene in the world's most horrific war. The Allies reported 5,000 killed and 15,000 wounded from the German gas cloud. This battle was, of course, just the beginning of chemical warfare. Hobbard defended his development of chemical weapons by saying, quote, The disapproval that the knight had for the man with the firearm is repeated in the soldier who shoots with steel bullets towards the man who confronts him with chemical weapons.

The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than flying pieces of iron. On the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, and the mutilations are missing. End quote. Hubber's wife was Clara Immerwar, who was a brilliant scientist in her own right. She was vehemently opposed to using chemical weapons and was a pacifist. Just ten days after the second battle of Epro, the first use of chemical weapons in the war,

and after a celebration for her husband Fritz, she took her own life. Years later, his son and eldest daughter also killed themselves. Haber's chemistry section was also responsible for the creation of explosives, and some historians estimate that Fritz-Hobber's contributions extended the war an extra three years. The irony is that after the war, the patriotic chemist who committed himself fully to the German cause, was turned on by the very country he served. The Nazis still considered him Jewish, despite having converted to Christianity. Fawber tried to flee to England, but they refused him entry due to his involvement in World War I.

He later died of a heart attack in 1934 in Switzerland. The final irony of his work is that after the war, his staff created a hydrogen cyanide-based pesticide for fumigating ships and warehouses. That product became known as Zyclan B, and it was the primary agent used for killing Jews and gas chambers during the Holocaust, and was used to kill several of Fritz Haber's nieces and nephews. So you can probably see why the legacy of Fritz-Hobber isn't so cut and dry. He is probably personally responsible for saving more lives than any other chemist in history. And he is probably responsible for taking more lives than any other chemist in history. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson.

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