Fritz Haber
Born	9 December 1868 Breslau, Germany
Died	29 January 1934( 1934-01-29) (aged 65) Basel, Switzerland
Nationality	German
Fields	Physical chemistry
Institutions	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology University of Karlsruhe
Alma mater	University of Heidelberg, Humboldt University of Berlin Technical University of Berlin
Doctoral advisor	Robert Bunsen
Known for	Haber process Born-Haber cycle Fertilizer Haber-Weiss reaction Chemical warfare Explosives
Notable awards	Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1918)

Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development for synthesizing ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. 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.

Biography[link]

Haber was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), into a Hasidic Jewish family. His family was one of the oldest families of that town.^[1] Haber later converted from strict Judaism to Lutheranism. His mother died during childbirth. His father was a well-known merchant in the town. From 1886 until 1891, he studied at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen, at the University of Berlin (today the Humboldt University of Berlin) in the group of A. W. Hofmann, and at the Technical College of Charlottenburg (today the Technical University of Berlin) under Carl Liebermann. He married Clara Immerwahr during 1901. Clara was also a chemist and an opponent of Haber's work in chemical warfare. Following an argument with Haber over the subject, she committed suicide.^[2] Their son, Hermann, born in 1902, would later also commit suicide because of his shame over his father's chemical warfare work.^[3] 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 Georg Lunge.

Nobel Prize[link]

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.^[4]

In 1918 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.

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 tonnes (employing 60,000 workers and selling at $45/ton) in 1925 to just 800,000 tonnes, produced by 14,133 workers, and selling at $19/tonne in 1934.^[5] The annual world production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is currently more than 100 million tonnes. The food base of half of the current world population is based on the Haber-Bosch process.^[6]

He was also active in the research of combustion reactions, the separation of gold from sea water, adsorption effects, electrochemistry, and free radical research (see Fenton's reagent). A large part of his work from 1911 to 1933 was done at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Elektrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem. In 1953, this institute was renamed for him. He is sometimes credited, incorrectly, with first synthesizing MDMA (which was first synthesized by Merck KGaA chemist Anton Köllisch in 1912).^[7][8]

World War I[link]

Haber played a major role in the development of chemical warfare in World War I. Part of this work included the development of gas masks with adsorbent filters. In addition to leading the teams developing chlorine gas and other deadly gases for use in trench warfare, Haber was on hand personally to aid in its release despite its proscription by the Hague Convention of 1907 (to which Germany was a signatory). Future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn served as gas troops in Haber's unit.

Gas warfare in World War One was, in a sense, the war of the chemists, with Haber pitted against French Nobel laureate chemist Victor Grignard. Regarding war and peace, Haber once said, "During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country." This was an example of the ethical dilemmas facing chemists at that time.^[9]

His first wife Clara, a fellow chemist and the first woman to earn a Ph.D at the University of Breslau, committed suicide with his service revolver in their garden, possibly in response to his having personally overseen the first successful use of chlorine at the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915.^[10] She shot herself in the heart on 15 May, and died in the morning. That same morning, Haber left for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russians.^[11] Haber left behind his grieving 13-year-old son, who had been the one to discover his dying mother.^[12]

Haber was a patriotic German who was proud of his service during World War I, for which he was decorated. He was even given the rank of captain by the Kaiser, rare for a scientist too old to enlist in military service.

In his studies of the effects of poison gas, Haber noted that exposure to a low concentration of a poisonous gas for a long time often had the same effect (death) as exposure to a high concentration for a short time. He formulated a simple mathematical relationship between the gas concentration and the necessary exposure time. This relationship became known as Haber's rule.

Haber defended gas warfare against accusations that it was inhumane, saying that death was death, by whatever means it was inflicted. During the 1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the cyanide gas formulation Zyklon A, which was used as an insecticide, especially as a fumigant in grain stores.^[13] During the Holocaust, Zyklon A was alterred by the Nazis to be used in the gas chambers of concentration camps as Zyklon B. Haber's creation of Zyklon A was used to kill millions after his death. This was one of many ironies and contradictions that would plague Fritz Haber's life.

Post-war[link]

In the 1920s, Haber searched exhaustively for a method to extract gold from sea water, and published a number of scientific papers on the subject. After years of research, he concluded that the concentration of gold dissolved in sea water was much lower than those reported by earlier researchers, and that gold extraction from sea water was uneconomic.^[14]

Haber's genius was recognized by the Nazis, who offered him special funding to continue his research on weapons. As a result of fellow Jewish scientists having already been prohibited from working in that field, he left Germany in 1933. His Nobel Prize-winning work in chemistry, and subsequent contributions to Germany's war efforts in the form of chemical fertilizers, explosives and poison munitions, were not enough to prevent eventual vilification of his heritage by the Nazi regime.

He moved to Cambridge, England, along with his assistant J J Weiss, for a few months, during which time Ernest Rutherford pointedly refused to shake hands with him, due to his involvement in poison gas warfare. Haber was offered by Chaim Weizmann the position of director at the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, in Mandate Palestine, and accepted it. He started his voyage to what is today Israel in January 1934, after recovering from a heart attack. His ill health overpowered him and on 29 January 1934, at the age of 65, he died of heart failure in a Basel hotel, where he was resting on his way to the Middle East.^[15] He was cremated and his ashes, together with Clara's ashes, were buried in Basel's Hornli Cemetery.^[16] He bequeathed his extensive private library to the Sieff Institute.

Haber's immediate family also left Germany. His second wife, Charlotte, with their two children, settled in England. Haber's son from his first marriage, Hermann, emigrated to the United States during World War II. He committed suicide in 1946. Members of Haber's extended family died in concentration camps. One of his children, Ludwig ("Lutz") Fritz Haber (1921–2004), became an eminent historian of chemical warfare in World War I, and published a book called The Poisonous Cloud (1986).^[17]

Criticism[link]

Haber received much criticism for his involvement in the development of chemical weapons in pre-World War II Germany, both from contemporaries and from modern-day scientists.^[18] The research results show the ambivalence of his scientific activity: on the one hand, development of ammonia synthesis for the manufacture of explosives and of a technical process for the industrial manufacture and use of poison gas in warfare, but on the other hand, development of an industrial process without which the diet of today's humanity would not be possible.

Further reading[link]

• Albarelli JR., H.P.: A Terrible Mistake:The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments - Trine Day LLC, 1st ed., 2009, ISBN 0-9777953-7-3
• Bernstein, Barton J.: Birth of the U.S. biological warfare program. Scientific American 256: 116 - 121, 1987.
• Geissler, Erhard: Biologische Waffen, nicht in Hitlers Arsenalen. Biologische und Toxin-Kampfmittel in Deutschland von 1915 - 1945. LIT-Verlag, Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2nd ed., 1999. ISBN 3-8258-2955-3.
• Geissler, Erhard: Biological warfare activities in Germany 1923 - 1945. In: Geissler, Erhard and Moon, John Ellis van Courtland, eds., Biological warfare from the Middle Ages to 1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-829579-0.
• Maddrell, Paul: Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany 1945 - 1961. Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-19-926750-2.

Dramatic treatment[link]

A fictional description of Haber's life, and in particular his longtime relationship with Albert Einstein, appears in Vern Thiessen's 2003 play Einstein's Gift. Thiessen describes Haber as a tragic figure who strives unsuccessfully throughout his life to evade both his Jewish ancestry and the moral implications of his scientific contributions.

BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play has broadcast two plays on the life of Fritz Haber. This is the description of the first^[19] from the Diversity Website:

The second was entitled "The Greater Good" and was first broadcast on 23 October 2008.^[20] It was directed by Celia de Wolff and written by Justin Hopper, and starred Anton Lesser as Haber. It explored his work on gas warfare during the First World War and the strain it put on his wife Clara (Lesley Sharp), concluding with her suicide and its cover-up by the authorities. Other cast included Dan Starkey as Haber's research associate Otto Sackur, Stephen Critchlow as Colonel Peterson, Conor Tottenham as Haber's son Hermann, Malcolm Tierney as General Falkenhayn and Janice Acquah as Zinaide.

In 2008, a short film entitled "Haber" depicted Fritz Haber's decision to embark on the gas warfare program and his relationship with his wife. The film was written and directed by Daniel Ragussis.^[21][22]

In November 2008 Haber was again played by Anton Lesser in Einstein and Eddington.^[23]

In January 2012, Haber was featured on an episode of Radiolab.^[24]

See also[link]

• List of Jewish Nobel laureates

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Daniel Charles, Master mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (New York: Ecco, 2005), ISBN 0-06-056272-2.
• Dietrich Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew: A Biography (Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2005), ISBN 0-941901-24-6.
• Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (2001) ISBN 0-262-19449-X
• Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (2008) ISBN 978-0-307-35178-4.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Fritz Haber

• Nobel e-Museum - Biography of Fritz Haber
• HABER - A Biographical Film about Fritz Haber
• Photographs of Fritz Haber's life
• A short biography of Fritz Haber, by Bretislav Friedrich
• Encyclopædia Britannica: Nobel Prizes - Fritz Haber
• "The Synthesis of Ammonia from its Elements", Nobel Lecture, 2 June 1920
• Fritz Haber: Jewish chemist whose work led to Zyklon B

Carl Bosch
Born	(1874-08-27)27 August 1874 Cologne, Germany
Died	26 April 1940(1940-04-26) (aged 65) Heidelberg, Germany
Nationality	Germany
Fields	Chemistry
Institutions	BASF, IG Farben
Alma mater	Technical College of Charlottenburg
Known for	Haber-Bosch process
Notable awards	Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1931)

Carl Bosch (27 August 1874 – 26 April 1940) was a German chemist and engineer and Nobel laureate in chemistry.^[1] He was a pioneer in the field of high-pressure industrial chemistry and founder of IG Farben, at one point the world's largest chemical company.

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Bosch was born in Cologne, Germany to a successful gas and plumbing supplier.^[2] His uncle Robert Bosch pioneered the development of the spark plug. Carl, trying to decide between a career in metallurgy or chemistry, studied at the Technical College of Charlottenburg (today the Technische Universität Berlin) and the University of Leipzig from 1892–1898.

Career[link]

In 1899 he took an entry level job at BASF, then Germany's largest chemical and dye firm. From 1909 until 1913 he transformed Fritz Haber's tabletop demonstration of a method to fix nitrogen using high pressure chemistry into an important industrial process to produce megatons of fertilizer and explosives. The fully developed system is called the Haber–Bosch process. After World War I Bosch extended high-pressure techniques to the production of synthetic fuel and methanol. In 1925 Bosch helped found and was the first head of IG Farben and from 1935 chairman of the board of directors. He received the Siemens-Ring in 1924 for his contributions to applied research and his support of basic research. In 1931 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Friedrich Bergius for the introduction of high pressure chemistry.

Personal life[link]

Bosch's grave in Heidelberg
49°23′46″N 8°41′33″E / 49.396155°N 8.692567°E / 49.396155; 8.692567 (Site at Bergfriedhof und Jüdischer Friedhof or Mountain cemetery - Bergfriedhof Heidelberg)

Bosch, a critic of many Nazi policies, was gradually relieved of his high positions after Hitler became chancellor, and fell into despair and alcoholism.^[2] He died in Heidelberg.

Legacy[link]

The Haber–Bosch Process today consumes more than one percent of the energy on Earth and is responsible for feeding roughly one-third of its population.^[3] On average, one-half of the nitrogen in a human body is synthetic, the product of a Haber–Bosch plant.^[4] Bosch was an ardent collector of insects, minerals, and gems. His collected meteorites and other mineral samples were loaned to Yale University, and eventually purchased by the Smithsonian.^[5][6] He was an amateur astronomer with a well-equipped private observatory. The asteroid 7414 Bosch was named in his honour.^[7]

Carl Bosch along with Fritz Haber were voted The Most Popular Chemical Engineers Ever by readers of the TCE Magazine.^[8]

The Haber-Bosch process, quite possibly the best-known chemical process in the world, which captures nitrogen from the air and converts it to ammonia has its hand in the process of Green Revolution which has been feeding the increasing population of world.^[9]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (2008) ISBN 978-0-307-35178-4.
• Peter Hayes (1987). "Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch: Chemistry and the Political Economy of Germany, 1925–1945". The Journal of Economic History 47 (2): 353–363. DOI:10.1017/S0022050700048117. JSTOR 2122234. 
• K. Holdermann (1949). "Carl Bosch und die Naturwissenschaft". Naturwissenschaften 36 (6): 161–165. Bibcode 1949NW.....36..161H. DOI:10.1007/BF00626575. 
• Carl Krauch (1940). "Carl Bosch zum Gedächtnis". Angewandte Chemie 53 (27–28): 285–288. DOI:10.1002/ange.19400532702. 

External links[link]

• Nobel biography
• recognition of their contributions to the invention and development of chemical high pressure methods.