Fritz Haber's ammonia feeds billions, and his gas weapons haunt history
Food grown with ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process is estimated to sustain nearly half the world's population. The same chemist also pioneered chlorine as a weapon in World War I, earning the title father of chemical warfare, and in 1934 he died in a Swiss hotel after quitting his post under the Nazis.
Haber was born on 9 December 1868 in Breslau into a prosperous Jewish family. His mother died three weeks after his birth, and his relationship with his father, a dye and pharmaceutical merchant, stayed distant and strained. He studied chemistry in Berlin, earned his doctorate in 1891, and endured apprenticeships and even handwriting lessons in the family firm; he urged his father to move into synthetic dyes and was refused. While an assistant at Jena he converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, possibly to improve his career prospects.
At Karlsruhe he rose through dye technology, combustion studies and electrochemistry, becoming full professor of physical chemistry in 1906. His defining achievement was a method for synthesising ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen gases, which made large-scale fertiliser and explosive production possible. It won him the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and estimates say about a third of annual global food production depends on it.
A known German nationalist, Haber devoted himself to chemical weapons during World War I, proposing heavier-than-air chlorine to break the trench deadlock at the Second Battle of Ypres. Later, without his direct involvement, his research fed into the development of Zyklon B, the pesticide the Nazis used to murder more than a million Jews in the Holocaust.
When the Nazis took power in 1933, Haber, of Jewish birth, resigned his post. In poor health he moved between countries until Chaim Weizmann invited him to direct a research institute in Rehovot that later became the Weizmann Institute. He accepted but died of heart failure on the way, in a Basel hotel, on 29 January 1934, aged 65.
Source: Fritz Haber
