Fritz Haber, an undisputed genius, born in Germany in the 1860's.
He saved more lives than potentially anyone else in human history.
And he saved those lives completely accidentally
while trying to figure out horrible ways to kill people.
He was as brilliant as he was heartless.
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The paradoxical life of Fritz Haber begins in 1868
in Breslau, what is now Poland.
Raised in a strict Jewish household,
Haber converted to Lutherism in his 20s
and spent the next several decades
trying to hide his Jewish heritage
From an early age, Haber excelled at the sciences,
climbing the academic ranks until he found his niche in the new field of physical chemistry,
which I took in undergrad, and it's HARD stuff.
By 1905, he had completed his third book,
which not only led to his promotion to full professor
but also hinted at some of his very first experiments into something called Nitrogen fixing,
something that would change the world.
Invention number one: In 1900, the Earth's population was about 1.6 billion people.
Now there are 5.5 billion more;
there are 7 billion of us walking around today
because we've eaten food which has given us the energy
to do awesome things like watch videos on YouTube.
In 1898, a British chemist named Sir William Cookes
predicted that the Earth's population will outpace the supply of wheat by about 1931.
Intensive farming was depleting the Nitrogen in the soil, raising fears of a global food crisis.
Although Nitrogen makes up about 78% of our atmosphere,
it exists as an exceedingly stable triple-bonded molecule: Diatomic Nitrogen or N2.
But for plants to actually have access to the Nitrogen to build themselves, it has to be "fixed",
or converted into the more reactive ammonia, which is NH3.
Before Haber, almost all Nitrogen was fixed over hundreds of years by micro-organisms in the soil.
But rich organic soils were rapidly disappearing.
So at that time, most industrialized countries, like Germany, relied on mined animal manure,
particularly bat guano from South America, to make Nitrogen based fertilizers.
Yea, and I should also probably mention that Nitrogen—Fixed Nitrogen—is also extremely useful for creating bombs.
By the early 1900s Haber was realizing that it was possible to synthesize ammonia
from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen under some specific circumstances
In 1908 Haber figured out that if he combined atmophsperic nitrogen with hydrogen
under immense heat, like 500 degrees Celcius
and immense pressure, like 150 to 200 atmospheres
circulated over a catalyst like iridium or osmium
it was possible to synthesize ammonia
By 1913 the process had been refined and commercialized with the help of a German chemist
Carl Bosch so that ammonia could be produced on an industrial scale.
This Haber-Bosch Process as it became known
is widely considered one of the most significant achievements of the 20th century
and although the history is murky here let's just say it doesn't appear that Haber set out
to fix nitrogen to stave off world famine.
Most believe he was far more interested in helping Germany make more explosives.
Because while ammonia can be made to produce fertilizer
it can also be easily converted into nitric acid
a very important ingredient for explosives.
And as World War I got underway in 1914 the allies
blockaded German ports cutting off Germany's supply to all those nitrates coming from South America.
Thanks in large part to Haber's invention
Germany was able to continue manufacturing ammunition from synthetic nitrate
and fight on.
And fight they did, thanks to another Haber creation.
Invention Number Two
Haber was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry
and Electrochemistry in 1911.
When World War I broke out he was
recruited to head up Germany's gas warfare division
and he dropped everything for the opportunity.
At this point Haber put his brilliant chemist's mind to work devising
gaseous compounds intended to injure or kill human beings.
He first came up with a caustic substance called Xylyl bromide
made with Bromine but that froze too easily and
proved worthless in battle so he
moved on to chlorine and worked on ways to discharge that chlorine gas
in enemy trenches.
On April 22nd 1915 Haber personally oversaw
the first large-scale gas attack in military history
in Belgium. As Germans attacked French, Canadian and Algerian troops
with more than 150 tons of the poisonous gas.
The chlorine gas proved to be horribly effective
the attack resulted in more than 10 000 injuries and deaths
many of those people drowning as fluid built up in their lungs. (Shudder)
Haber returned to Berlin to throw a dinner party
to celebrate his fantastic new method of killing people
in the most horrific and painful way possible.
Where his wife Clara, a successful chemist in her own right
told him that she could not live with him using their science to create such horrible weapons
Presumably, Haber told her to get out of his grill and
mind her own business because that she shot herself in the chest
Haber was so shaken by her dramatic action
in favour of a more human world that he
stopped all work on chemical weapons and
no, I'm just kidding he actually left the following day to
oversee a gas attack on the Russian front and
continued to supervise Germany's chemical warfare program.
BLEEP. BLEEPhead.
Always desperate to prove his patriotism he oversaw
the development of Mustard Gas which proved
even more effective than chlorine because
it was heavy and settled in the trenches.
He also helped invent a gas mask for German troops
after allied forces began using chemical weapons themselves.
Despite all their best efforts Germany lost that war. You know that.
Or at least I hope you know that.
But what you might not know is that in 1919 Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemisty
for improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind.
I BLEEP you not.
Naturally this award caused a bit of controversy
and if you ever want to see what a white-washed biography looks like
go take a look online at the official Nobel Prize write up on Haber
Which, to this day, devotes all of a half a sentence to Haber's work on chemical weapons
Then again Alfred Nobel is best known as the inventor
of dynamite so maybe it makes sense.
The year after receiving his Nobel prize Haber
was charged with war crimes
but was never prosecuted.
Still, Germany's defeat was a crushing blow to him
personally and he vowed to pay of all of Germany's monetary war reparations
by himself.
He tried to do it, I BLEEP you not once again
by extracting Gold from seawater.
There's a lot of Gold in seawater!
Its' just hard to get out. There's so
much sea and there's gold in it and
he was like "I CAN USE CHEMISTRY!"
For 6 years in the 1920s with the help
of an experimental ship
Haber searched the oceans for bling and he came up pretty much empty handed
By the early 1930s with Hitler rising to power
and anti-semitism growing Haber
could no longer hide his Jewish roots and
despite the fact that he was such a tireless proponent of the German cause
he was forced to resign from the Wilhem Institute
in 1933 and was essentially kicked out of the country
that he loved so much.
He dies in Switzerland at the age of 65
the following year.
LEGACY. The story of Fritz Haber does not end there
His inventions and contributions had a continued legacy
in the hands of other chemists and they too, are grim.
Earlier in his career Haber had invented an insecticide
called Zyklon A
without any, like, actual goal of killing people this time
It was one of his inventions that he actually didn't want to hurt people with
But it wasn't a particularly notable invention except that
in the years that followed German scientists tinkered with the formula
to produce a new gas called
Zyklon B. Specifically they removed it's strong warning
odour, the gas was used in Hitler's concentration camps
to kill millions of prisoners during World War II.
Among the victims, members of Haber's own family.
As for the nitrogen fixing process that Haber co-invented
even its benefits are increasingly questionable.
Today factories around the world make
over 100 million tons of synthetic nitrogen based fertilizer every year
And an estimated 2 billion people depend
on the Haber-Bosch process
to grow their food.
But the long term environmental impact of this nitrogen fixing process has
been kind of frightening
Synthetic fertilizers are chronically overused
and the nitrate run-off from farms around the world
is having a devastating impact on water quality.
Run-off from fertilizers sets off explosives growths of algae
in water ways and oceans
As the enormous amounts of algae decompose they suck oxygen from the water
creating enormous dead zones
Where no aquatic life, save a few jellyfish, can exist.
Here in the US the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico
expands to more than 20 000 square kilometres each summer
and each year it gets bigger. The PEW Oceans Commissions currently lists
nitrogen fertilizer as the main source of oceanic pollution.
Beyond that nitrogen fertilizers also release large quantities of nitrogen oxide into the air
A greenhouse gas 300 times more heat trapping than carbon dioxide
Now Fritz Haber couldn't have predicted the environmental impact of the invention that bears his name
I don't really think he would care.
Creating fertilizer wasn't even his top priority when he set out to capture nitrogen out of the air
His goal was to keep his country armed for war
and he ended up feeding half of the world in the process.
As history reminds us again and again
Science isn't good or bad, it's only true
The people with the best intentions can have the worst impacts
and those who only want to kill might end up saving billions of lives.
The science doesn't care. It's up to us to decide what we do with it.
Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow Great Minds
If you have some great minds that you would like us to discuss please
tell us in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter
We will see you next time. Goodbye.
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