Draft:Fritz Haber
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Fritz Haber (9 December, 1868–29 January, 1934) was a German chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for "Haber-Bosch" process, a process to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere. This process basically allowed for fertilizer to be created, which has fed billions of people over the course of its existence, and is considered one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. However, Haber didn't create the Haber-Bosch process to create fertilizer and help people. He created it to allow Germany to make bombs for warfare, fertilizer wasn't even in his mind. Fertilizer was just a good side-effect of a bomb creation process. This sums up the career of Fritz Haber perfectly, for he was a chemist who used his intelligence to create human suffering or to assist the country he loved. One such innovation to help his country was the creation of chemical weapons, and he oversaw their use in warfare for the first time in human history. Even the items he created to help people would be transformed into terrible items of suffering.
Fritz Haber's creations are a perfect example of why science at times is morally grey. Inventions meant to harm people can be used for good, and inventions meant to be used for good can be used to better harm people. Science is not seen as morally leaning one way or the other, and that is an important thing to consider when looking at scientific discoveries throughout the years.
Early Years[edit]
The most important thing to note about Fritz Haber's family is that they were Jewish. Though Fritz was never considered a practitioner of the Jewish faith, and eventually converted to Lutheranism (he did it to have a better chance of getting military positions), his heritage is going to be important when some fascist assholes take control of his country. Another thing to note is that Fritz's father and Fritz hated each other. Fritz's dad was a prominent German dye manufacturer, and Fritz did not want to take over the company like his father wanted. Fritz often butted heads with his dad over Fritz's desire to go into chemistry. Eventually, Fritz's dad gave up on them working together, and Fritz was basically shoved off to do whatever.
Fritz Haber's specialty in chemistry was physical chemistry which, if you have ever talked to a chemistry major, is a hard subject. He would be praised for his work in the field, and would become a professor of physical chemistry at a university in 1894.
Haber-Bosch Process[edit]
Going to be simplifying a lot of complex science, if you are a chemist please don't kill me...
Nitrogen is a big deal in the world of agriculture. Crops need nitrogen from the soil to fuel their growth. Nitrogen also makes up a huge part of our atmosphere. Yet the nitrogen in the atmosphere is not what plants need to grow. Plants need nitrogen in a more unstable form, which is NH3 or ammonia. Now, at the dawn of the 20th century, the only place to find ammonia was in soil and in bat poop. As the population of the Earth passed 1 billion at this time, scientists began to worry about the growth of humanity out-pacing the growth of the world's food production, and began to fear that because of large-scale agriculture, the soil would not last long in keeping ammonia and thus lead to wide-spread famine. There wasn't really any way though to solve this besides harvest more bat poop, that was until Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch showed up.
By taking atmospheric nitrogen (N2), hydrogen (3H2), and heating it up to a high temperature under immense pressure, one could create ammonia. That is basically what the Haber-Bosch process is, heating up nitrogen and hydrogen to chemically create ammonia. With this discovery, ammonia production was commercialized, and thus, ammonia fertilizer could be produced to help give plants nitrogen, saving the world's agriculture!
Yet, Haber didn't synthesize ammonia for fertilizer. For you see, ammonia is also a prominent component of another human creation... explosives...
Ammonia can be used as an oxidizer when mixed with a small amount of fuel. When the fuel is lit on fire, the ammonia combusts, leading to an explosion. Mining companies use this stuff in quarries and in mining operations all the time, yet in the early 20th century, Germany was fixated on using this in their artillery shells. Furthermore, through a couple of steps, ammonia can be converted into nitric acid, an essential ingredient in making various explosives. When World War I broke out, Great Britain blockaded German ports, meaning that Germany could not import ammonia from Chile (which was the largest supplier of bat poop based ammonia). However, with the Haber-Bosch process gladly given to the German military cause Fritz was a hard-core nationalist, Germany could still produce explosives and other ammunition for the trenches, possibly prolonging the war and leading to extra millions dying. Good work Fritz (/s)!
Even though Fritz created his process to kill, fertilizer is often regarded as one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. Billions rely on it to grow their food, and it has allowed humanity to keep pace with food supply feeding an ever growing population that is now 6 billion more people bigger than in 1911. Yet, fertilizer is not perfect. Fertilizer run-off into streams and rivers are decreasing the water-quality of many waterways due to the nitrogen causing algae-blooms, huge swathes of algae covering large areas of water blocking sunlight and sucking oxygen out of the water, basically killing everything underneath it.
Chemical Warfare[edit]
“”The disapproval that the knight had for the man with the firearm is repeated in the soldier who shoots with steel bullets towards the man who confronts him with chemical weapons. [...] The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing
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| —Fritz Haber explaining why drowning in your own fluids is the same as getting shot |
Fritz Haber again, was a hardcore nationalist. He had already helped keep German machine guns loaded for use in warfare, now he had to help Germany win the war, a daunting task. As such, he was given the military rank of captain, and assigned to the chemical warfare section of the Ministry of War, where he would invent his second notable invention, chlorine gas.
Chlorine at room temperature is a gas. However, getting a gas from point A to point B without having it disperse is a very daunting task. Fritz Haber created a process where he would put the gas into extremely cold cylinders, which would then be opened, allowing the liquid chlorine to be transported across a battlefield as it evaporated into a gas.
On April 22nd, 1915, near the Belgian town of Ypres on the Western Front, German forces unsealed containers of chlorine, and unleashed 168 tons of chlorine gas on colonial forces opposing them across no-man's land. The Entente didnt know what was happening... until the cloud of yellowish-green gas hit them... For those of you who don't know, chlorine gas is an irritant. It stings the eyes and throats of those who come near it. But the true danger is long exposure to the gas, for you see, chlorine chemically mixes with the mucus of the lungs forming hydrochloric acid, which is destructive to tissue. Chlorine gas kills you by making you drown as the acid in your lungs build up to the point of destroying them and causing asphyxiation. In other words, its a fucking awful way to go.
Fritz Haber was decorated immensely for this great service of killing or wounding 67,000 people with chemistry, even though Germany had signed an agreement saying using chemical weapons in warfare was a war crime! Fritz Haber would also go on to create "Haber's Rule", the formula "concentration of gas + exposure time to gas = time it takes for person to die to gas". He also continued to personally oversee uses of chlorine gas and other chemical agents across the eastern and western front.
This took a toll on Fritz's family. His wife, Clara Immerwahr, who was also a brilliant chemist and the first woman to earn a PhD in chemistry at her university, was not happy with how chemistry was being used to brutally kill young people in warfare. As a pacifist, she heavily disagreed with her husband's work, and alongside her marriage causing her to leave her career to raise a family, grew deeply depressed. On May 2, 1915, when Fritz Haber had returned from Ypres, he got into a serious argument with Clara. No one knows the exact details of the argument, but it is speculated that Clara was confronting Fritz about him using chemistry for militant and violent purposes. Regardless of what was said, Clara went into the family garden, pulled out a pistol, and shot herself in the chest. To make this already grim situation worse, Fritz didn't even discover the body, for he left to go oversee a gas attack against the Russians that day, leaving his twelve year old son to find his mother's body, and its widely accepted her gunshot wound did not kill her instantly. If science had an award for "biggest asshole in science", Fritz Haber would be the top contender, but instead we gave him a fucking Nobel Prize (more on that later).
Fritz continued working on more gruesome ways to kill people with chemistry. Haber was on the team that developed mustard gas, and if you thought dying of chlorine sucked, let me tell you about what mustard gas does...
Mustard gas is, like chlorine, an irritant. The difference is though is that if mustard gas forms blisters on any part of the body it comes in contact with. These blisters pus, and can lead to extreme discomfort and pain. Worse yet, it can get inside your throat and esophagus and tear the mucus membrane from both, leading to severe pain and vomiting. External and internal bleeding are common side-effects of exposure to mustard gas. Fatally exposed victims can take four to five WEEKS to die from it. This is the stuff Hitler got exposed to in the trenches and almost died from. It was the most commonly used chemical agent in the War, and it was horrifying. Fritz Haber helped make this.
100,000 people would die from chemical weapons in World War I, with untold millions suffering injuries as a result of exposure. Since WWI, over one million people have been casualties of chemical warfare, most notably during the Iraq-Iran War, and during the Syrian Civil War. All thanks to one German scientist with a hard one for the Kaiser.
Nobel Prize[edit]
“”When the First World War broke out he was appointed a consultant to the German War Office and organised gas attacks and defences against them.
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| —The only sentence on Fritz Haber's Nobel Prize Biography that mentions his work on chemical weapons |
Fritz Haber would win the Nobel Prize for his work on the Haber-Bosch process and its affect in 1918. Of course this was due to the process making fertilizer and not anything violent, no sir. If you want to read a totally white-washed piece of biographical material, just look up Fritz Haber on the Nobel Prize's official website. But to be fair, Alfred Nobel is known for inventing dynamite, which was how artillery shells were able to be so deadly in warfare. Maybe its just tradition at this point?
After the War[edit]
After World War I ended in total German defeat, Fritz Haber took it upon himself to relieve Germany of its massive debt by trying to obtain gold from seawater! Yes, gold exists in seawater, but in very very VERY small amounts. Which, Fritz Haber had the misfortune to realize, after sinking tons of money into it and writing numerous papers on it. At least no one died from this scientific quest.
Yet, the biggest kick in the throat for Fritz came in the 1930s when a man with a funny mustache took control of Germany. Almost as soon as the Nazis took power, they began eliminating Jewish people from workplaces, including scientific ones. Fritz Haber was one such victim, as he was fired from the institute he was working at. This came to a shock, cause Fritz Haber had served his country nobly for decades and in warfare, and he wasn't even Jewish, he converted! Sadly, Haber made the mistake of assuming that the Nazis would be reasonable or logical in any capacity in their decision to label him a Jew. As a result, he fled Germany to Switzerland, where he died of a stroke in 1934. Rest in piss I guess.
The worst part was that after his death, Fritz Haber's inventions continued to bring misery to the world. In the 1920s, Fritz Haber invented a pesticide that would be effective at killing insects, especially in grain stores. This gas was called "Zyklon A". Now, if that name sounds familiar, you probably have heard of its cousin, which was created when the Nazis took Zyklon A and removed the odor and any sensory notification of the gas's presence. This new gas, called "Zyklon B", would be the main gas utilized at Nazi camps throughout the Holocaust, and would kill millions of Fritz's people, including many members of Fritz's family.
His immediate family didn't end up better either. Fritz Haber's oldest son, the one who found his mother with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, immigrated to the US with his wife. His wife sadly passed away in 1946, and the son, like his mother, killed himself in despair. Fritz Haber's oldest daughter also immigrated to the US, where she began work on an antidote to her father's chemical weapons, especially chlorine gas. Yet, the US cancelled funding for her work to increase funding for the atomic bomb program. As such, the daughter also killed herself. A tragic family with a terrible and awful family patriarch...