Dope

Limited Inc amused a friend in L.A. a month ago by arguing that the 20th century's greatest scientist, in terms of the impact of his work on human history, was not Albert Einstein, but Fritz Haber. True, if Time Magazine had put Haber's picture on the cover as the greatest person of the century, the iconic resonance would have been somewhat less. As in, people would say, who the hell is Fritz Haber?

Here's what Haber did:



"On July 2, 1909, Haber and a colleague in the laboratory at Karlsruhe produced a continuous flow of liquid ammonia, about a pint in five hours, from hydrogen and nitrogen fed into a hot five-inch iron tube a couple of feet tall, the gases at 200 atmospheres pressure over an osmium metal catalyst."

Sounds, well, boring, right? But before Haber synthesized nitrogen, the world agricultural system depended on either organism induced nitrogen enrichment -- via the humble legume -- or enrichment by way of waste, whether that of birds (guano) or of humans (nightsoil) or of the beasts of the field and the street (which is why the immense amounts of horse shit deposited in cities in the 19th century eventually wound its way back to the field). My friend was amused because this sounds like a curious, but in itself unimportant, fact. It is something only a crank would pounce on. As you know, dear reader, Limited Inc has never been afraid of crankishness. Haber, whose work was put into workable factory order by Bosch (hence the name for the Haber-Bosch process), was not the genius Einstein was -- in fact, he wasn't a genius at all, just an exceptionally clever chemist. Probably someone else would have come along and synthesized nitrogen in the 20th century if Haber hadn't done it -- but the fact is, Haber did do it. As William McNeill wrote in Something New Under the Sun, his environmental history of the 20th century, without synthesized fertilizer, the world could only support its present human population by putting an area of land equal to the size of Latin America under cultivation.

Environmentalists, Limited Inc feels, have never fully confronted this fact. The assumption of those who decry the quantity of environmental harm caused by fertilizers -- and it is immense -- is that if these fertilizers didn't exist, a Malthusian mechanism would have culled the world population, thus maintaining an equilibrium between population and resources. Yet this kind of thinking -- which is based on the classical economic models of the 19th century -- doesn't convince us. Perhaps the one to two billion extra people we can surely attibute to synthesized nitrogen just wouldn't have materialized given the more restrained resources of the pre-Haber world; yet look at the 19th century's patterns of cultivation, the seemingly unstoppable acquisition and use of lands as diverse as the Great Prairies and the pampas, and it is easy to imagine another case, in which even greater swathes of tropical land area would be put to the plow as food needs expand.

The American Scientist review of Vaclav Smil's book on Haber draws the consequences of Haber's work for you, sitting at home with your cornflakes:

"In the year 2000, Haber�Bosch synthesis worldwide produced about 2 million tons of ammonia a week. For the 6 billion of us to be fed now, Haber� Bosch synthesis provides more than
99 percent of all inorganic nitrogen inputs to farms. Synthetic ammonia supplies about the same nitrogen tonnage in fertilizer for our crops as all green nature gains both from its microorganisms and from lightning. The raw materials for Haber�Bosch synthesis are atmospheric N2 and the natural gas that supplies both hydrogen and most of the energy. Haber�Bosch today uses energy quite frugally; only one-sixtieth of commercial fuel worldwide is now used to make ammonia.

The country that now synthesizes most ammonia is neither Germany nor Japan nor the United States, but the land where the most people sit daily to table�China. About one-third of its limited natural gas is used to make fertilizer, and in many older, smaller plants much coal is used as well. Children in the developing world feed on crops grown with fertilizer made from synthetic ammonia, and the 2 or 3 billion more of us who will arrive by mid-century will do the same."

It is hard to imagine the world without synthetic ammonia. Certainly it would be a world much less urbanized than our own. The great fact of the 20th century is that rural society, as the dominant force in culture, disappears, at least in the Western Industrial societies. In fact, it has disappeared so rapidly, and so completely, that few people are aware of the negative space, so to speak, thereby created.

As for Fritz Haber, his life could have figured in a play by his contemporary, Georg Kaiser:

"The Haber-Bosch process is generally credited with keeping Germany supplied with fertilizers and munitions during World War I, after the British naval blockade cut off supplies of nitrates from Chile. During the war Haber threw his energies and those of his institute into further support for the German side. He developed a new weapon�poison gas, the first example of which was chlorine gas�and supervised its initial deployment on the Western Front at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915. His promotion of this frightening weapon precipitated the suicide of his wife, who was herself a chemist, and many others condemned him for his wartime role. There was great consternation when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.

After World War I, Haber was remarkably successful in building up his institute, but in 1933 the anti-Jewish decrees of the Nazi regime made his position untenable. He retired a broken man, although at the time of his death he was on his way to investigate a possible senior research position at Rehovot in Palestine (now Israel)."