Contributers to Agriculuture: Fritz Haber (December 1868-January 1934)

Father of Ammo­ni­ated Nitro­gen for plant nutri­ents
By Matt Ault­man
darkecountyfarmer@gmail.com

Haber was born in Bres­lau, Ger­many. From 1886 until 1891, he stud­ied at the Uni­ver­sity of Hei­del­berg under Robert Bun­sen (more noted for the Bun­sen burner like what is found in many Chem­istry class­rooms). Before start­ing his own aca­d­e­mic career, he worked at his father’s chem­i­cal busi­ness and in the Swiss Fed­eral Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy in Zürich with George Lunge, an out­stand­ing pro­fes­sor on the sub­ject of Indus­trial Chem­istry.
Dur­ing his time at Uni­ver­sity of Karl­sruhe from 1894 to 1911, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch devel­oped the Haber process, which is the cat­alytic for­ma­tion of ammo­nia from hydro­gen and atmos­pheric nitro­gen under con­di­tions of high tem­per­a­ture and pres­sure. He was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chem­istry for this work (he actu­ally received the award in 1919).
The Haber-Bosch process was a mile­stone in indus­trial chem­istry, because it divorced the pro­duc­tion of nitro­gen prod­ucts, such as fer­til­izer, explo­sives and chem­i­cal feed­stocks, from nat­ural deposits, espe­cially sodium nitrate (caliche), of which Chile was a major (and almost unique) pro­ducer.
Nat­u­rally extracted nitrate pro­duc­tion in Chile fell from 2.5 mil­lion tons (employ­ing 60,000 work­ers and sell­ing at $45/ton) in 1925 to just 800,000 tons, pro­duced by 14,133 work­ers, and sell­ing at $19/ton in 1934. The annual world pro­duc­tion of syn­thetic nitro­gen fer­til­izer is cur­rently more than 100 mil­lion tons. The food base of half of the cur­rent world pop­u­la­tion is based on the Haber-Bosch process.
He was also active in the research of com­bus­tion reac­tions, the sep­a­ra­tion of gold from sea water, adsorp­tion effects, and elec­tro­chem­istry. He has also been described as the “father of chem­i­cal war­fare” for his work devel­op­ing and deploy­ing chlo­rine and other poi­so­nous gases dur­ing World War I.
Fritz Haber con­tributed to agri­cul­ture by devel­op­ing an inex­pen­sive form of fer­til­izer, so farm­ers could pro­duce more crops to feed a grow­ing world.

Matt Ault­man is the chair­man of the Agri­cul­ture Com­mit­tee or the Darke County Cham­ber of Com­merce, and serves on the mem­ber­ship com­mit­tee of the Darke County Farm Bureau

Posted by Ashley Fritz on Dec 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.