The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

Thomas Hager’s book, The Alchemy of Air, is an extraordinary book that is both fascinating and instructive . It focuses largely on Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. Both became Nobel Laureates. Haber was the utterly brilliant chemist who created the process that made it possible to create synthetic nitrogen fertilizer out of air when supplies of natural fertilizer from Peru and Chile were beginning to diminish, thereby threatening the world with catastrophic famines. In addition to fertilizers, synthetic ammonia products were also the basis of explosives. Haber’s discovery provided Germany with both the food and the explosives that enabled Germany to stay in WW I for four years; Without it Germany would have had to surrender after about two years. It is estimated that up to half of the world's population is alive because of Haber's devvelopment of synthetic fertlizer. Haber also invented the poison gas that was first launched at the Allies at the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915. The Allied forces were unprepared for the attack in which 10,000 are said to have perished. Haber developed the gas and also the method of delivery. He calculated when the wind would blow the gas away from the German lines and toward the Allied lines. Haber also developed Zyklon A, out of which Zyklon B, the gas used by the Germans in WWII to exterminate the Jews. Both Bosch and Haber were important scientists at BASF before I. G. Farben, the great German conglomerate, was created. Bosch was able to design and have constructed the huge factory that made the mass production of ammontia economically feasible. Without his practical implementation, the Haber discovery would have been economically useless. BASF’s original factory site was at Ludwigshafen. During the early part of WW I, the French were able to bomb Ludwigshafen even with their primitive planes. Bosch created a new site, Leuna, which was far less accessible to French bombers. In WW II, another Farben product. Leunabenzin, synthetric gasoline, enabled Germany to stay in the war in spite of the diminution of supplies of natural petroleum products. During WW II allied, mostly American, bombers bombed Leuna as the key to taking Germany out of the war. When I. G. Farben was originally formed in 1925, Bosch became its head, In the late 1930s Farben was the world's largest chemical corporation and the world's fourth largest corporation., In addition to BASF, Farben's component corpoations included Hoest, Bayer, Agfa, Fritz Haber (1868-1934) was born Jewish in what was then Breslau and is now Wroclaw in Poland. He converted to Lutheranism. Both of his wives were born Jewish but converted as a condition of marriage. About twenty per cent of BASF-Farben’s scientists, before Hitler, were Jewish as were a number of members of the governing board. Bosch was not a Nazi. He tried unsuccessfully to retain the Jewish scientists. He was more helpful in finding work for them outside of Germany. Farben was speedily Nazified. Bosch ended up an emotional wreck who drank too much after attempting to appease the Nazis while attempting to get his Jewish scientists out of Germany. Both Haber and Bosch were utter geniuses. I did not realize the crucial importance of Farben before reading this book.I knew it was important. In reality it was crucial to Germany's war effort in both wars. One of Farben's corporations during WW II was I.G. Auschwitz which produced buna, synthetic rubber, using Jewish slave labor which were worked to death and then replaced by other slave laborers who were similarly worked to death. After the war, the Allies put an end to Farben although its component parts have flourished. Haber was regarded as a Jew by the Nazis although he had been a passionate German nationalist. It can be argued that Haber was the most important scientist of the first half of the twentieth century because of his creation of synthetic fertilizer, It can be argued that he was one of the most destructive because of his contributions to German weaponry. In 1933, he left Germany for Cambridge where Lord Rutherford, Britain's leading physicist, refused to shake his hand, According to Hager, the huge jump in the world’s population since 1900 was due to the work of Haber and Bosch. Without it, there would have been at least 40% fewer people in the world. Thus, Haber was one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. Without his discoveries and Bosch’s productive implementation, there would have been catastrophic Malthusian famines. But, Haber who enabled so many to live was also the inventor of the poison gas that killed many. He created zyklon a; zyklon b was used by the Nazis in their death camps. In spite of his desire to serve Germany, the Nazis wanted him out and disgraced. He was a Jew.Religious conversion meant nothing to the Nazis.

Fabulous book with a lot of information for the reader , in a romanticized manner for lay readers. Give the story behind the process of discovery and fabrication of chemical for improving the world hunger but also the Second World War bomb!

Overall, I enjoyed Alchemy of Air and the examination of the Haber-Bosch process and its impact on the world. The book raised a lot of interesting questions on the utility and consequences of fixing nitrogen from the air. Though, the premise of the book is a bit melodramatic. The author claims that over 2 billion people are alive as a result of the Haber-Bosch process, but that seems pretty speculative. This is my favorite quote from the book from Bosch: "I have often asked myself whether it would have been better if we had not succeeded. The war perhaps would have ended sooner with less misery and on better terms. Gentlemen, these questions are all useless. Progress in science and technology cannot be stopped. They are in many ways akin to art. One can persuade the one to halt as little as the others. They drive the people who are born for them to activity." This is Bosch's opinion, and it highlights the double-edged nature that this book does of good job of explaining. In fact, the book seems to touch mostly on the negative aspects of the pursuit of better fertilizer and the Haber-Bosch process. Much of the book covers wars, including wars in South America over Guano and salt in Chile, WWI, and WWII. It touches on the slave-like work conditions in Peru and Germany. And in the end, the book notes that the end result is pollution and obesity. One aspect of the book that threw me off in certain parts was when the author described the challenges with developing the Haber-Bosch process, related to finding a catalyst and dispersing hydrogen. The book would seem to spend a couple paragraphs describing the issues and then suddenly the next sentence would state that Bosch somehow found a solution with explaining the process. It seemed to make the book over dramatic in parts. Overall, I liked the book.

50% of the nitrogen in our bodies came from the Haber–Bosch process. It’s in every protein and every strand of DNA. Ponder that — “half of the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.” I just finished Hager’s Alchemy of Air, the story of “the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life-and-death importance for the largest number of people. Put simply, this discovery is keeping alive half the people on earth.” The Haber-Bosch process catalyzes the production of ammonia (NH3) from N2 and H2 gas. We need “fixed nitrogen”, available to our organic chemistries as atomic nitrogen. It is the limiting factor for the growth of all food. While nitrogen gas is about 80% of our atmosphere, not one atom of it is available for our use when tightly bound by the triple bond of N2 gas, the strongest chemical bond in nature. It is sequestered all around us. In nature, N2 is liberated to atomic nitrogen in small amounts by lightning strikes (it needs 1000°C) and slowly by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. Hager argues that if we reverted to relying on just those natural sources, three billion people would die of starvation in short order — our soils simply could not produce enough food for the mouths now on Earth. Historically, fixed nitrogen came from manure and compost, the first supply to be used up. Once local bat caves were depleted, the world looked for new sources. In 1850, the Chinchas Islands off the coast of Pisco, Peru became the most valuable real estate on Earth. They were covered by centuries of bird guano, excavated by slave labor in a hellish scene. Guano became 75% of the GDP of Peru by 1859. But the world wanted more. In 1856, the U.S. passed the Guano Islands Act, whereby anyone could annex a guano island they found anywhere in the world and make it a U.S. territory. Then the Guano War of 1863 broke out between Spain and Peru and Chile. Darwin had discovered peculiar nitrate deposits in high Atacama Desert of Chile. And by 1900, Chile was supplying 2/3 of all fertilizer on Earth. The Chilean harbor was the location of the first major sea battle of World War I, between France and Germany. The nitrate supply was essential to war-making. “They later called World War I the chemist’s war.” As we saw in the massive explosion recently in Lebanon, fixed nitrogen can also be used to make explosives or provide the “N” in TNT or nitroglycerine. As a latecomer to the nationhood, Germany did not have colonies to exploit for food or fuel, and their shipping lanes were vulnerable to foreclosure by the British navy. Germany’s chemical companies undertook a major effort to pull fixed nitrogen from the air, to support local food production and the munitions of war. “BASF’s nitrogen project grew into the biggest scientific effort in history, comparable in scale to the Manhattan Project in WWII.” The goal was to find a catalyst that could assist with the required chemistries by reducing the temperature and pressure required to something that could be economically feasible in an industrial plant. After 20,000 experiments, running through the periodic table, they discovered osmium could do the trick, and BASF cornered the market for this rare element, but even that would not be enough for the volumes needed. Then they found uranium, and finally, a more reasonable iron-aluminum-calcium combination. The factories required staggeringly huge pressure vessels, like had never seen before. We use the same catalysts today, in a codependency with the petrochemical economy of byproducts and waste heat. The Haber process consumes 4% of the world's natural-gas production and 1.5% of the world's energy supply. Half of the nitrogen in fertilizer is taken up by plants, much of the rest washes out. Fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi river has doubled nitrates in the the Gulf of Mexico, making it look like chocolate milk with an enormous Dead Zone. In Europe, the annual 1.5b tons of nitrogen fertilizer runoff from the Rhine has made the Baltic Sea one of the most polluted marine systems on Earth. Even our atmosphere has become a “huge fertilizer silo, with tons of growth-promoting fertilizers showering from the sky. The amount of fixed nitrogen filtering down to earth in some places has risen so high that it equals the amount American farmers typically apply to their spring wheat.” Nitrogen oxides also create acid rain. We have become dependent on fertilizer. To recap, “while the population nearly quadrupled during the twentieth century, food production — thanks first to Haber-Bosch, second to improved genetic strains of rice and wheat — increased more than sevenfold. That is the simple math behind today’s era of plenty.”

I imagine few people know of the importance of the work of Fritz Haber and Bosch. According to Thomas Hager, “Their work stands, I believe, as the most important discovery ever made.” Some people might argue that fire, simple weapons and tools, and the wheel out rank their ability to turn air into fertilizer, and hence into food, but it is almost certainly the most important discovery made within the past few thousand years. Of course, it also enabled turning air into explosives, and Bosch’s invention of high pressure chemistry, which made the conversion of coal into fuel possible, made Nazi Germany’s war possible. So, their work saved billions from starvation, and made it possible to murder millions. The book acquaints us with many obscure historical details, such as the guano trade in the late 1800s, and the harvesting of nitrate from Peru and Chile. As well as the importance of Bosch’s factory to the Nazis, and the desperate attempt of the Allies to destroy that factory. I wish I had read this book thirty years ago. I teach AP Chemistry, every year I present the chemical equation of the Haber process in teaching chemical equilibrium: N2 + 3H2 ‹=› 2NH3 + heat, but there are so many interesting and important details that text books leave out. The reaction, to yield a usable amount of ammonia, must be run at 200 atmospheres pressure, using a catalyst so that it can be run at a temperature that will not excessively favor the reverse reaction. The search for a suitable catalyst involved a multitude of trial and error runs, and the equipment needed to operate at such high pressures did not exist, and hydrogen gas, being such a small molecule, seeps into the atomic interstices of metals and causes degradation. And so on. There are many people who are convinced that artificial fertilizers are unnecessary, and an example of corporate greed to profit from something despite how destructive they are to the environment. This is not true. I think everyone agrees that natural manure would be preferable to the use of artificial fertilizer, but there is no enough of it. We used all the natural manure we could on our farm, including human feces since we had an outhouse, but it was nowhere near enough. China, as Hager points out, had massive starvation in the 1960s, due in part, of course, to Mao’s incompetence, but also because of a lack of fertilizer, and the Chinese certainly knew how to garner manure effectively. Nixon’s reopening trade relations with China enabled them to build Haber-Bosch factories so that now the Chinese are starting to have the same obesity problems that America has – well, not quite that bad. However, we are pumping vastly larger quantities of nitrates into the world than has ever been done before, and it is causing enormous dead zones where large rivers empty into the ocean, and the formation of greenhouse gases that on a molecular basis, absorb far more IR than CO2. Everything good has its bad side, or even several of them.

I did not consider reading this book until it was recommended by a friend. The title suggests that it might be too technical for the average reader. That is not the case at all. Thomas Hager is able to blend a story of scientific discovery into a biography of two Nobel Prize winners. Having engaged in scientific research for all of my professional life, these two chemists had characteristics that I have often observed in many scientists. Hager brings their personalities to life. He also adds another layer to the story, the history of the first half of the twentieth century and the worldwide competition for raw materials, especially to power the war machine. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of technology development.

Didn’t quite know what to expect in reading this book. Picked it up because I like two of the authors other books. I’ve learned so much history from this book which I found more interesting than the science. I must admit, though, that the author. Did an excellent job of making the science interesting although I didn’t follow all of it by any means.

Nature alone could not allow the current population living on earth. Plant growth is limited by the quantity of fixed nitrogen available and this compound is naturally produced only by some bacteria, by lightnings and few other ways. Humble nature can only produce a limited amount of fixed nitrogen , and hence limited amount of crops can be harvested, and limited amount of people can be fed and live on the earth. At the beginning of 20th century, living population was reaching the limits of sustainability, like a bacterial colony inside a culture flask ( In the end man is like a bacteria living in the world flask, isn't it ? ). The reaching of the limit would have had tragic consequences for humanity ( huge famines, social instability, wars, etc., like what happened in China during the fifties). The extraordinary invention that is the subject of this book, and that allows the transformation of atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer, made possible for the human kind to further expand and to reach the actual population level. The book is well written and its technical level is basic enough to be suitable for a wide audience. The author is clearly gifted and the characters development and trivia mix effectively and spice the narration. In the end, I was appalled by the consideration that 2 billions people live on the earth only thanks to Haber-Bosch machines ( China was dying of starvation and they survived thanks to 12 HB machines bought by the government ) and the a large amount of nitrogen inside our bodies is artificial and comes from the same process. We are artificial.

el libro llego bien, el libro se ve bueno aunque no lo he leido.

Great read, a book anyone interested in the development of industry or the wars should read.

A mixture of science and history. I worked at BASF R&D doing similar chemistry at high pressure and feel humbled by the achievements of Bosch. It is a privilege to have worked at a site that gave so much to the world. Nowadays we have little idea of how difficult it was to get it done and simply take it for granted.

Very entertaining book with many stories and facts of two men that changed the world.

I first came across parts of this story in Sam Keans excellent “Caesars Last Breath”. Thomas Hager tells the full depth of Fritz Habers “discovery” and Carl Bosch’s engineering prowess with fascinating detail and fluidity. We start with the Malthusian ideology - the world doesn’t have enough land to sustain growing populations and famines were seen as an inevitably. Hence the growth of colonial empires seeking land for food and their peoples. The discovery of guano and the Chilean saltpetre is a well told introduction. What impressed me most about this book is the author is not afraid to shy away from some of the technical details, really shining a light on the continued improvements Carl Bosch made on the process engineering process and his team made in finding the best and cheapest catalyst for the process of ammonia production. Where the story becomes intertwined with history is just fascinating. BASF, a due company, has plenty of chlorine which Fritz Haber puts to ill use in the trenches of WW1. The company becomes a munitions manufacturer using the nitrates from the H-B process. After WW1, BASF merges with others in IG Farben, literally translating into “in the interest of dye companies”. Yet, it was Bosch and his interest in synfuels that provoked the next wave of Nazi interest, allowing it to be almost self sufficient in gasoline or Leunabenzein (for those interested in learning more about the oil industry, Hitlers obsession with oil and why he headed for Stalingrad and not Moscow, read “The Prize”). The personal lives of Haber and Bosch are well documented, intertwining with other scientific celebrities of the day such as Einstein and Planck. Habers struggles with German pride and his own Jewish past are well told as are Boschs personal conflict on increasing industrial prowess with his underlying disturbance at war and conflict. This is an impressive book, well researched on what just be one of the greatest - or at least important - stories in science. My only qualm is that is current worldly implications of artificial fertiliser are summarised rather hastily at the end, but for a 270 page book it packs plenty of weight at a good pace. A book that I will refer back to again and again.