The Chemists Who Saved The World From World Hunger

Whose invention was also to make explosives in war

Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch — both photos from the Nobel Foundation, Public Domain

“At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world’s scientists to find a solution.” — Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air

The German language has a term called “Bros aus Luft” which means “bread from air”, and it would refer to a famous chemistry process named the Haber-Bosch process, which according to Tim Harford at BBC, half the world wouldn’t be alive without. The Haber-Bosch process is a chemical process that turns air into ammonia, the basis of fertilizer. In chemistry, this process is called nitrogen fixation, a process that converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia.

Well, the exact specific process turns atmospheric nitrogen, with hydrogen as a catalyst, to ammonia. To get as much ammonia as possible under equilibrium, however, you need a lot of pressure (about 200 atmospheres) and a lot of heat (about 400–450°C).

For most chemists, conditions like these were not very safe — the famous Henry Le Chatelier, the founder of the stoichiometric principle that tortures young chemistry students, had a terrible explosion in his lab when trying to combine…