The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 53: A Simple Solution

Episode Date: May 2, 2017

His formula saved millions from starvation - among other things.

This is the way I heard it. Fritz was a chemist with a very simple philosophy. The bigger the problem, the simpler, the solution. So, when he turned his mind to the problem of global starvation, Fritz didn't focus on the lack of food. He focused on the lack of poop. Back in the early 20th century, the production of nitrogen-based products was completely reliant upon the acquisition of ammonia from natural deposits, and there just wasn't enough poop on the planet to fertilize enough crops to feed the exploding population. So, rather than round up feces from every species, Fritz decided to recreate ammonia's catalytic formation from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen.

In other words, Fritz pulled ammonia from thin air. N2 plus 3H2 equals 2NH3, a simple solution that revolutionized modern agriculture and save the lives of over a billion people. That's why Fritz Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918. The question is, why did his wife, in the midst of her husband's great triumph and groundbreaking research, suddenly kill herself? Like Fritz, Clara Haber was a brilliant scientist. Unlike Fritz, she was a pacifist and deeply opposed to Germany's role in the First World War.

Moreover, she was appalled that her husband was willing to help the Kaiser develop chemical weapons on the battlefield. But Fritz felt otherwise. Death is death, he said, no matter how it's inflicted. And though a scientist belongs to the world in times of peace, he belongs to his country in times of war. In truth, Fritz's approach to chemical warfare was not much different than his approach to saving the world from starvation. It was simply a question of maximizing efficiency.

Chemical weapons at the time were deadly, but not fast acting. In battle, there was little sense in poisoning your enemy if he could still shoot you before dying a few days later. So Fritz focused not on creating a better gas, but on improving the level of toxicity in those gases available to him. Chlorine, mustard, sulfur, and side. cyanide. And so doing, Fritz discovered, a great mathematical truth as simple as it was incontrovertible. C times T equals K. Today, we know it as Haber's rule, and it's simple enough to explain in one sentence, if you double the concentration of a toxic gas, you can kill a person in half the time. Haber's rule would turn chemical weapons

into practical weapons and transform the Western Front into a version of hell that remains unsurpassed in modern warfare. Clara was not only opposed to Fritz's work, she was horrified by its implications.

So Clara implemented her own, simple solution. She took her husband's service revolver from his office, walked into their tasteful garden, and shot herself through the heart. Fritz, couldn't attend the funeral. The day after Clara killed herself, he was summoned to Belgium,

where he oversaw the first chemical attack of World War I and the implementation of the simple solution that would soon bear his name. At the second battle of Ipre, Fritz watched his deadly yellow fog roll across the Belgium field and into the trenches occupied by the French. Through field glasses, he saw their eyes bulge and their faces twist and agony. He watched as they coughed up their lungs and suffocated in the mud. C. T. T. Eber's rule. Simplicity in action. After the war, Fritz remained busy until his death in 1934. In his lab, he developed Zyclan A, a powerful and revolutionary insecticide that once again improved food production all through Europe, followed, of course, by a cyclone.

Zyclon B, which took chemical warfare to a whole new level. True, the Geneva Convention had since outlawed toxic gas on the battlefield, but there were other places, places that Fritz had never imagined, places like Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald. There were no rules in such places except for his. Haber's rule, a rule that assured Zer's, Zyclon B would send millions of innocent civilians to an early and agonizing death. Ultimately, Fritz was right.

Death is death by whatever means inflicted. But Haber's rule led to more death than Fritz could have ever imagined. After his wife committed suicide, his daughter Claire also took her own life. Then his son, Herman. And let's not forget the untimely death of his half-sister, Hilda, and her. Her husband and their two children, they died in the death camps of Nazi Germany. Their last breaths filled with the deadly gas that Fritz himself had helped create and deliver. And that, of course, is the ultimate irony.

Fritz Haber was a humanitarian whose first simple solution saved the lives of millions and earned him the Nobel Prize. He was also the father of chemical warfare. whose second simple solution took the lives of millions and became the key component to Adolf Hitler's final solution. A complicated legacy for the German patriot descended from Jews. Anyway, that's the way I heard it.