Fritz Haber and the uses of science
I had never heard of chemist Fritz Haber until a couple of days ago, when I watched a TV dramatization of his story that was so melodramatic that I thought it was surely an exaggeration.
But surprisingly, when I looked Haber up, I found that his real story was even more dramatic, if possible, and more fraught with moral questions about the use of science.
Haber received a Nobel Prize in 1918 for his work in “fixing” nitrogen—a substance that previously had to be extracted from natural sources such as guano—from the air for use in fertilizer. His discovery paved the way for modern agriculture and its ability to feed many more people than previously possible (the slogan became “Bread out of air“).
But Haber was also a pioneer in chemical warfare—for Germany during WWI. A Jew who had converted to Christianity, he was a loyal and patriotic German, dedicated to the war effort.
Haber’s defense might have been that the French started it. He also said, “During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country” and asserted that killing was killing.
Haber’s wife (who was also trained as a chemist) committed suicide, perhaps in protest of his chemical warfare work, perhaps not. Their son did the same in 1946.
Haber discovered the limits of his devotion to Germany during the Hitler years. There were some things he would not do:
In 1933 he was ordered to fire all Jews in his Institute. He was told he could stay, despite being Jewish. He refused the order and instead left Germany, only to die of heart failure within a year.
Ironically, another of Haber’s inventions, Zyklon A, which he had developed as an insecticide, was modified to Zyklon B after his death and used in the gas chambers of Hitler’s death camps.
There is a pretty interesting book, “The Alchemy of ir,” focused on both Haber and Carl Bosch, the other developer of the Haber-Bosch process.
The process of fixing nitrogen allowed the Germans to produce all the explosives and ammunition they needed in WWI.The Germans never ran out of ammunition. They ran out of food and men. I suppose you could blame Haber for the length of WWI because everybody had plenty of amunition.
Every chemist – indeed, everyone who’s taken an undergraduate chemistry course – knows about Haber.
Ray: Yes, I recall that was in the TV program, too.
In terms of “blame,” I don’t think scientists can be blamed for tangential uses of their discoveries in ways they did not intend and foresee. Haber developed nitrogen-fixing with the purpose of aiding agriculture, not warfare. But Haber was very directly involved in chemical warfare. The more interesting question, I think, is whether he is to “blame” for that (since the French had already used chemical warfare prior to Haber’s efforts).
Occam’s Beard: I never took chemistry in college, although I did take two years of it in high school, and liked it very much.
One of the classic chestnuts in undergraduate chemistry is using the Born-Haber cycle to calculate lattice energies of solids. That, the Haber process for fixing nitrogen, and the Haber-Bosch process, are the first three Haber contributions that leap to mind.
Sorry, should have proofed. The Haber-Bosch process IS the one for nitrogen fixation. My bad.
you should do more research on this…
Fritz Haber ALSO created Mustard Gas…
and yes, she did kill herself when her history would forever be about being with the man who did that in the war..
AFTER She died, he then went on to make mustard gas…
however, Haber had nothing to do with the mass exterminations as done by the nazis. he died in 1934… so the work that converted his pesticide, was not his, he was already dead as hitler started to seize power
look at the timeline…
here is a quote:
Haber was next appointed to the position of director for the Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem, where he would remain until forced out of the country in 1933 due to Nazi Race Laws and his Jewish heritage.
the nazi race laws were not created until 1935
Nuremberg Laws The Nuremberg Laws (German: Né¼rnberger Gesetze) of 1935 were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. After the takeover of power in 1933 by Hitler, Nazism became an official ideology incorporating antisemitism as a form of scientific racism.
perhaps they really mean Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service… that was in April of 1933…
Hitler agreed to these amendments and the bill was signed into law on April 7, 1933. In practice, the amendments excluded most Jewish civil servants and not until after Hindenburg’s death in 1934, were they disallowed. Nonetheless, passage of the Berufsbeamtengesetz was a crucial turning point in the history of German Jewry for it marked the first time since the last German Jews had been emancipated in 1871 that an anti-Semitic law had been passed in Germany. In one particularly notable example of the law’s effect, Albert Einstein resigned his position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences and emigrated to the United States before he could be expelled.
he is considered:
the father of modern chemical warfare
I feel sorry for him, for if you read things in detail, he is not the monster that monsters make him out to be, an hide behind…
[recently that wacky pseudo science show dark matters featured him. i ahve watchd the show, but they dont tell full history in favor of letting your mind run]
you can put Haber in the EXACT same category as MAXIM… and a few others.
having an academic view of the world, they had, like today’s intellectuals, a working knowledge that didn’t work.
habers idea of using gas was to make the war end so fast, wars would not be practicable.. ie. get it over and done with fast by any means…
it was not an uncommon idea at the time as it was the best of all worlds for such people. they get to make something, get funding, and the war ends faster, etc..
Maxim had the same idea, though unlike haber, literally spoke about it and credited it. those here who know such war trivia would recognize the name. the maxim machine gun was created to be so good, that war would be futile… (ever hear that about nuclear weapons?)
in truth, gas was not used that much, but its psychological impact was enormously disproportionate to its use. (its posed MANY problems given war and winter!)
What company made Zyclon B?
What ties and things stem from there?
Zyklon B was pure Prussic acid…
[when breathed it causes a heart attack which later the soviets used it for assassinations]
funny you didn’t know about him as i said to read that history of Germany, zyklon, etc, as far back as 2009…
it would be nicer and more apropos to remember haber the way we would remember jethro tull if we as a culture had memory any more after the feminists/and others changing things so nothing gets passed on…
George Harrison Shull
Henry A. Wallace
Rachel Carson
(hey feminists said women cant do that)
Robert Fraley
John Deere
Eli Whitney
Cyrus McCormick
George Washington Carver
(a black researcher born 1860s. how did he do that too?)
Norman Borlaug
Fritz Haber
Without the Haber-Bosch process, we would not be able to feed our global population—Haber’s discovery has helped feed countless billions of humans.
the number of lives he saved vastly outnumber the lives he helped take…
and since he was dead by the time Zyklon B was created, those deaths are not on his hands.
According to the fieldpost letter of Major Karl von Zingler, the first chlorine gas attack of German military took place before 2 January 1915: “In other war theaters it does not go better and it has been said that our Chlorine is very effective. 140 English officers have been killed. This is a horrible weapon…”
the chemical broke the lines..
but since it wasnt controllable, the soldiers could not run into the area to take control of it, and so the hole in the line closed by the time they could. so a kind of waste.
tons of the stuff were used… but resulted in few casualties (compared to other things) and was dangerous for your own side, given wind shifting.
World Population: How Did It Get So Big?
http://riversedge.hubpages.com/hub/World-Population-Growth
According to MIT Press, the Haber-Bosch process “has been of greater fundamental importance to the modern world than … the airplane, nuclear energy, space flight, or television. The expansion of the world’s population from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to today’s six billion [in 2000] would not have been possible without the [industrial] synthesis of ammonia.”
credit him for the birth of 4 billion…
dont curse him for the deaths of thousands..
Artfldgr: I’m not sure why you are making the point that Haber is not responsible for Zyklon B because it was developed after his death, because I did look at the timeline, and already have made that point myself.
I wrote in the post, “was modified to Zyklon B after his death,” and then I wrote in this comment, “In terms of ‘blame,’ I don’t think scientists can be blamed for tangential uses of their discoveries in ways they did not intend and foresee.” I was explicitly referring to explosives in that sentence, but I also was assuming the reader would understand it applied to Zyklon B and Haber as well. In my post, I also called the development of Zyklon B from Haber’s original work with the pesticide Zyklon A “ironic,” implying that of course it was not his intent and he bore no responsibility for that development.
As far as Haber’s wife and her suicide goes, I did quite a bit of research on that before I wrote the post, but I didn’t go into detail as to why I wrote “maybe” about the cause of her suicide. It is well documented that she was against his involvement in chemical warfare. But she had also been unhappy for a long time about other things, involving her marriage and her lack of use of her chemistry degree. She left no suicide note, and scholars have argued over the cause of her suicide.
And I know that Haber can take credit for helping to feed billions of people. That’s part of my point, as well.
Fritz Haber ALSO created Mustard Gas</i}
Nope. Victor Meyer is generally credited with the first synthesis of mustard gas, because he published the first paper describing its synthesis and physicochemical proerties in detail; Haber was involved with its use in WWI.
I've actually worked with mustard gas (long story, but I needed it in a synthesis), and it's the worst stuff in the world – a thick gooey liquid that's a total b!tch to handle, too viscous to pipet, too gooey to weigh, too involatile to handle by vacuum line techniques, but volatile enough to burn the bejesus out of you. Miserable stuff that causes horrendous and extremely painful blisters that burst and reform for days afterward and take months to heal, as I found out at first hand (literally; I still have scars merely from the vapor, which went right through rubber gloves. Another delightful property.).
Fun fact: Meyer, in the fashion of chemists of his day,put a drop on his tongue. /shudder
Sorry i wasn’t clear… the point was that most places do not do a thorough looking as you did, or as i do… so most try to tie him to that… you would be surprised in the short time looking up stuff i knew how many were basically cutting and pasting the dominant thing they found, with little actual noting or correcting for timelines
As far as his wife.. well, i believe it was related to the work he did… her condition leading up to the act may have primed the pump, but once primed, it has a way of looking at the world in such a way that amplifies things as you look forward… we forget that the time period itself, the wife shared very much the outcome of her husbands… we still do it today. its seen most interestingly weird in the fact that wives more often than one would think, end up taking their husbands political position after the husband dies. (in other cases we ignore the husband to make the story more pomo… like in the case of heddy lamarr and helen gurly brown, etc)
though i suspect given the rest of the story her family may much be like the Hemingway family…
I got to meet and talk with Mariel, and a young Hemingway, it was enjoyable (some meetings are not)
though as i point out… thanks to the left they don’t want to credit him for populating the world and destroying their idea of a proper amount of eugenics based people…
if people knew that his one idea that worked led to 4 billion extra people (and most likely responsible for many of the protesting people, the revisionists, existing!)…
heck… if the left idiots would stop being idiots half the things they think are problems would not be problems… want to grow food? if energy was cheap, you would not need farms… anyone notice that there are nice hydroponic tomatoes in most markets and they were grown under an enriched CO2 environment? a 15 story building powered by nuclear materials, could grow food in an endless process and soil would not ever have entered the building…
anyway… its all moot…
we don’t care about such things. that’s the ideal of the white mans culture of the oppressive gulag 50s… today we are smarter, we like genetic celebrities over any actual merit…
His story shows that technology does not solve human failings, it brings them into focus. I’ll prefer to remember his work in agriculture. Another notable agronomist was Norman Borlaug. Together these two nobel laureates may have done more to boost crop yields and save lives than anyone in history. They proved the malthusian luddites of the environmental movement wrong.
neo-neocon Says:
“Artfldgr: I’m not sure why you are making the point that Haber is not responsible for Zyklon B because it was developed after his death, because I did look at the timeline, and already have made that point myself. ”
And/or that he needs a lot of defending. If the French used chemical weapons first… well… hard to blame the Germans for doing it back.
Yah, I’ve known of the Haber-Bosch process for a couple decades, now. It’s one of the passing threads in the excellent, but now slightly dated BBC series “Connections”.
IIRC, it’s connected to the creation of artificial textiles like Rayon (and, hence, Nylon).
It also unfortunately extended WWI by allowing Germany to continue to produce explosives despite having inadequate access to natural sources of “fixed” nitrogen as the result of allied shipping blockades.
>>>> And/or that he needs a lot of defending. If the French used chemical weapons first… well… hard to blame the Germans for doing it back.
Well, lot of time this can be followed back to some stupid error of some sort.
For example, the firebombing and general indiscriminate bombing of cities (as opposed to pure military targets) by the Allies is tied to Hitler’s bombing of London… which was itself retaliation by Hitler in response to an inadvertent bombing run vs. military targets that dropped (I believe) a single load on a city by accident.
More ironic still is that this switch probably cost Hitler the war.
The British defense of its homeland was closely tied to its ability to keep its own pilots in the air, so there was a strong focus by the Nazis to take down their airfields, and the Brits were on the verge of collapse, the Nazis were poking holes in their runways faster than they could patch them and get planes back in the air.
When Hitler ordered the bombers to hit London, instead, it gave the Brits a critical breather to repair the runways and get the Spitfires back in the air. They never looked back after that.
If Hitler had kept to the original plan, the Brit’s air defenses would have almost certainly failed, and the invasion of England might have occurred more or less on-time.
Had that invasion been successful (granted, another big “IF”), then the USA would have had a much tougher time breaking into Fortress Europe using northern Africa as a staging ground.
Using the UK as a staging base — a friendly, English-speaking nation with an industrial support infrastructure already in place, which also happened to be mere miles from the beaches in Normandy — as opposed to the back-asswards nations of NAfrica separated from Europe by a huge Mediterranean sea — was rather clearly quite a bit easier.
The Zyklon A/B issue is part of what troubles us today.
Look on a can of insect spray. The antidote is usually atropine. Atropine was when I was in, maybe still is, issued as an antidote to nerve gas. So if somebody starts doing the funky chicken, you take his atropine spring-loaded syringes and shoot him full of the stuff.
Oops. “in”, means in the service.
So when some clown like Saddaam has a vigorous agricultural support industry, we know he can produce nerve gas by adjusting a couple of valves at the insecticide plant.
Any pre-emption is going to look as if we want locusts to eat up all their crops.
Hence the term “dual use”. It has the capacity to make insecticide or nerve gas. It has the capacity to keep enemies who have to answer to their compassionate left at bay.