The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

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A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the Haber-Bosch discovery that changed billions of lives--including your own.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was facing global disaster: Mass starvation was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world' s scientists to find a solution.

This is the story of the two men who found it: brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, and saved millions of lives.

But their epochal triumph came at a price we are still paying. The Haber-Bosch process was also used to make the gunpowder and explosives that killed millions during the two world wars. Both men were vilified during their lives; both, disillusioned and disgraced, died tragically.

The Alchemy of Air is the extraordinary, previously untold story of a discovery that changed the way we grow food and the way we make war-and that promises to continue shaping our lives in fundamental and dramatic ways.

Review

Named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Kirkus Reviews

"Make[s] the scientific process as suspenseful as a good whodunit."
--Oregonian

"[A] smooth, well-researched book that reads like a fast-paced novel."
--News & Observer (Raleigh)

"This scientific adventure spans two world wars and every cell in your body."
--Discover magazine

"Haber and Bosch are fascinating if troubled personalities, brought by Hager compellingly to life."
--Washington Post Book World

"[A] gripping account of the partnership between two Nobel Prize winners whose efforts to save the world had tragic consequences we're still sifting through today."
--Plenty magazine

"You will certainly find [Hager's] story of [Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch] and their discover to be enlightening and entertaining....I know of few other books that provide the general reader with a better portrait of chemistry as the most useful of sciences, and I intend to recommend it to scientists and non-scientists alike."
--The Journal of Chemical Education

"Many discoveries and inventions are touted as history-changing. But as Thomas Hager admirably proves in his new book, The Alchemy of Air, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch not only changed history, they made much of recent human history possible. As Hager solemnly notes in his introduction, 'the discovery described in this book is keeping alive nearly half the people on earth.' ....As with almost all technological advancement, however, there is a downside. The synthetic Haber-Bosch nitrogen, which now makes up about half the nitrogen in every human body, also fueled the weapons of the world wars and created a nitrogen-rich environment that is having a huge impact on Earth, from lush vegetative growth to dead zones in the oceans. Thanks to two visionary and troubled scientists, we are all now, in Hager's words, 'creatures of the air, ' dependent for our very existence on a process whose consequences we don't completely understand."
--BookPage

A fast-paced account of the early-20th-century quest to develop synthetic fertilizer. Today hundreds of factories convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia in order to manufacture the artificial fertilizers that make modern-day agricultural yields possible. They are based on the technological advance known as the Haber-Bosch process, developed prior to World War I by the German chemists and Nobel laureates Fritz Haber (1868-1934) and Carl Bosch (1874-1940). Hager (The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug, 2006, etc.) offers a superb narrative of these brilliant men and their scientific discovery. Around the turn of the century, the world faced a shortage of the fixed nitrogen needed to provide food for a growing population. Hager sets the stage by describing the world's reliance in the 19th century on nitrates from Peru and Chile that could be used as natural fertilizer or to make gunpowder, and finds plenty of human drama in the battles to control the lucrative international trade. Determined to help end Germany's dependence on South American nitrates, Bosch and Haber worked at the German chemical company BASF to find a way to convert nitrogen into ammonia. Bosch developed the process, and Haber designed bigger industrial plants. By 1944, the Haber-Bosch factory at Leuna--a primary target for U.S. bombers--occupied three square miles and employed 35,000 workers. The author not only illuminates the scientists' complex work, but also digs into their personal lives. Bosch, a melancholic with a huge villa in Heidelberg, asked Hitler to spare Jewish scientists for the sake of German chemistry and physics (the Fuhrer replied: "Then we'll just have to work 100 years without physics and chemistry!"). Haber, a Jew, developed the chlorine gas used in World War I, sought a way to extract gold from the oceans to pay off German war reparations and conducted research that led to the development of the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi death camps. Science writing of the first order.
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

About the Author

A veteran science and medical writer, THOMAS HAGER is the author of The Demon Under the Microscope; Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling; and more than a hundred news and feature articles in Reader's Digest, Journal of the American Medical Association, and many other publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The prophecy was made in the fall of 1898, in a music hall in Bristol, England, by a thin man with a graying, neatly trimmed beard and a mustache waxed to alarmingly long, needlelike points. His audience, the cream of British science, thousands of formally dressed men and bejeweled women, were seated in a low-rent venue, what Americans would have called a vaudeville palace--a last-minute substitute for an academic auditorium that had burned down--but they dutifully filed in and filled every seat from the orchestra pit to the highest balcony. The hall was uncomfortably hot, especially in the upper seats. Exquisitely gowned women began opening their fans. Evening-coated men began murmuring to their neighbors that it looked as if it were going to be a long evening.

The speaker was Sir William Crookes, 1898's incoming president of the British Academy of Sciences. Impeccably dressed, erect and resolute, he looked every inch the triumphant, newly knighted physicist he was: inventor of the Crookes Tube (a predecessor of the cathode ray tubes used later for televisions and computers), recent discoverer of an interesting new addition to the periodic table that he had named thallium, fearless explorer of science, even out to its furthest edges--Crookes was an active researcher in the area of seances and the question of life after death.

Inaugural speeches were often deadly dull. The incoming presidents of scientific associations almost always droned long lists of achievements made during the past year, with nods to numerous individual researchers, sprinkled with homilies about the importance of science for the British Empire. Crookes, however, had decided to shake things up. He adjusted his oval glasses, glanced at his notes, looked up, and got right to the point. "England and all civilized nations," he said, "stand in deadly peril."

The fans in the balcony stopped fluttering. Crookes's voice was clear but he spoke softly. The hall went silent, the audience straining to hear as the speaker continued. If nothing was done soon, he explained, great numbers of people, especially in the world's most advanced nations, were soon going to begin starving to death. This was a conclusion that he was forced to accept, he said, after considering two simple facts: "As mouths multiply," he said, "food sources dwindle." The number of mouths had been increasing for some time thanks to advances in sanitation and medical care, from the installation of improved water systems to the introduction of antiseptics. These were great triumphs for humanity. But they carried with them a threat. While population increased, land was limited; there were only so many farmable acres on earth. When every one of those acres was under the plow and farmed as well as it could be, the population would keep going up, the farmed and refarmed soil would slowly lose its fertility, and mass starvation would, of necessity, ensue. His research led him to estimate, he said, that humans would begin dying of hunger in large numbers some time around the 1930s.

There was only one way to stop it, he said. And then he told them what it was.

Every agricultural society in every age has had its own methods, rites, and prayers for ensuring rich crops. Homer sang of farmers gathering heaps of mule and cow dung. The Romans worshipped a god of manure, Stercutius. Rome made an early science of agriculture, ranking various animal excrements (including human), composts, blood, and ashes according to their fertilizing power. Pigeon dung, they found, was the best overall for growing crops, and cattle dung was clearly better than horse manure. Fresh human urine was best for young plants, aged urine for fruit trees.

Both the Romans and the ancient Chinese also understood that there was another key to a healthy farm: crop rotation. No one knew why or how it worked, but never planting the same crop twice consecutively in the same land, instead alternating it with certain crops like peas and clovers, managed to replenish the fertility of fields. Every few years the Chinese made sure to rotate in a crop of soybeans; chickpeas were the crop of choice in the Middle East, lentils in India, and mung beans in Southeast Asia; and Europeans used peas or beans or clover. "Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow" was more than a children's rhyme. It was a timetable for successful farming.

Healthy farms had compost pits, plenty of domestic animals for manure, and a system of crop rotation. But it was never enough. It took scores of tons of manure per acre to grow great crops. Manure gathering and handling grew into a small industry, employing thousands of workers who scoured the countryside for cow and pig excrement, cleared city streets of horse manure, and then sold it by the stinking ton to farmers and gardeners. There was never enough. A heavy application of manure helped for a season or two, but then the fertility of the soil declined and more was needed. In the most intensively cultivated land in Europe--the Marais district of Paris--owners of small city-garden plots applied dung at rates as high as hundreds of tons per acre, and every year they had to repeat the process. By 1700 or so, hungry Europeans were experimenting with other soil additives in an attempt to increase their yields, trying sea salt, powdered limestone, burned bones, rotting fish, anything that might keep their soils producing.

But the world's best farmers were not in Europe. In the wet, warm farmlands of southeastern China, farmers a millennium ago were already expert in using every possible kind of fertilizer, hoarding their human waste and adding it to the output from their domestic animals, composting vegetable scraps and leaves, and tossing in seed cakes to enrich their fields. It was all applied to the most ingenious farm system imaginable: a complex of dike-and-pond fields in which they grew not only rice, mulberries, sugarcane, and fruits but also carp. The fish waste helped fertilize the crops. The dung of the water buffaloes used to work the fields helped fertilize the crops. So did the waste of the ducks that swam in the ponds. They grew a native water fern in the paddies that acted like a crop of soybeans, adding fertility to the soil. The tropical climate allowed multiple harvests per year. This was the highest-yield traditional agricultural system ever devised. Using it, the Chinese could feed as many as ten people with the output from each acre of farmland, a yield of food five to ten times higher than the European average of the 1800s. "The Chinese are the most admirable gardeners," an appreciative European scientist wrote in 1840. "The agriculture of their country is the most perfect in the world."

It was not enough. During the nineteenth century, millions of people left the farm and flocked to cities during the Industrial Revolution. As the cities grew and the population of the earth rose faster and faster, it became clear that feeding ten people per acre, the pinnacle of traditional agriculture, was nowhere near good enough. The crisis Crookes predicted would have happened fifty years before his speech, but for the opening of vast new farming territories, from the Great Plains of the United States and the steppes of Russia to the vast landscapes of Australia. When their land played out, farmers simply moved west or south or east to the next expanse of virgin soil.
Now, however, Crookes warned, the earth held no more Great Plains. The globe had been explored, mapped, and the best agricultural areas settled and plowed. From this point on, farmers would have to make do with the land they had, refarming the same acres year after year. This brought Crookes to the critical issue: When land was farmed repeatedly, no matter how carefully crops were rotated, no matter how scrupulously every bit of animal dung was applied, the soil slowly lost its original fertility.

His analysis focused on wheat, the staple of Europeans and North Americans, the staff of life for Caucasians. Any drop in wheat production threatened, as he put it, "racial starvation." His conclusion, based on what he called stubborn facts, seemed incontrovertible: In a few decades, the populations of the great wheat-eating peoples--including the Caucasians of the British Empire, northern Europe, and the United States--would outstrip their grain of choice, and thousands of people, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, would begin to die.

The best traditional farming techniques in the world were not enough to avert the coming crisis. England itself was using the most advanced farming techniques, the best possible mix of crop rotation, animal manuring, and composting, and the English, he said, would be starving now if they did not import tons of grain from other nations. What would happen when those other nations, in order to feed their own growing populations, stopped exporting?

Review:

4.9 out of 5

98.46% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Complicated people, Complex science

". · 26 February 2024

A fully detailed history not just of Bosch and Haber, the Haber Bosch system and the world in which they worked/lived/operated but a complete understanding of the history and challenges of the subject and ssociated people. It provides both a technical history and a very personal one for the characters involved.Recommended for anybody who likes a technical history. One that is easily read and flows well, taking the reader along.

5.0 out of 5 stars One of greatest discoveries and stories in science, told in an entertaining way

L.K. · 11 July 2020

I first came across parts of this story in Sam Keans excellent “Caesars Last Breath”.Thomas Hager tells the full depth of Fritz Habers “discovery” and Carl Bosch’s engineering prowess with fascinating detail and fluidity.We start with the Malthusian ideology - the world doesn’t have enough land to sustain growing populations and famines were seen as an inevitably. Hence the growth of colonial empires seeking land for food and their peoples. The discovery of guano and the Chilean saltpetre is a well told introduction.What impressed me most about this book is the author is not afraid to shy away from some of the technical details, really shining a light on the continued improvements Carl Bosch made on the process engineering process and his team made in finding the best and cheapest catalyst for the process of ammonia production.Where the story becomes intertwined with history is just fascinating. BASF, a due company, has plenty of chlorine which Fritz Haber puts to ill use in the trenches of WW1. The company becomes a munitions manufacturer using the nitrates from the H-B process.After WW1, BASF merges with others in IG Farben, literally translating into “in the interest of dye companies”. Yet, it was Bosch and his interest in synfuels that provoked the next wave of Nazi interest, allowing it to be almost self sufficient in gasoline or Leunabenzein (for those interested in learning more about the oil industry, Hitlers obsession with oil and why he headed for Stalingrad and not Moscow, read “The Prize”).The personal lives of Haber and Bosch are well documented, intertwining with other scientific celebrities of the day such as Einstein and Planck. Habers struggles with German pride and his own Jewish past are well told as are Boschs personal conflict on increasing industrial prowess with his underlying disturbance at war and conflict.This is an impressive book, well researched on what just be one of the greatest - or at least important - stories in science.My only qualm is that is current worldly implications of artificial fertiliser are summarised rather hastily at the end, but for a 270 page book it packs plenty of weight at a good pace.A book that I will refer back to again and again.

4.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting read.

J.C. · 2 August 2015

The pace of the book is reasonably fast, and gives a very interesting overview. The pace is complimented by the writing style, which is not too ornate. There is a decent balance between description of events and the authors interpretation and speculation (of motives, etc.).I would recommend this book to anyone interested in history of science; although, for those with more chemistry and/or engineering knowledge, this book does not explore those aspects of the story in any great depth, and as such may not satisfy those interests.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Alchemy of Air

A.E.C. · 14 May 2009

The Alchemy of AirIt is ironic that the man whose self-imposed mission to save Germany, economically and militarily, was a German Jew. He invented the process for fixing nitrogen which is still dominant in the chemical industry a century later. He invented poison gas. And he tried unsuccessfully to extract gold from seawater in order to pay his country's reparations. The author of this biography of Fritz Haber (1868 - 1934) studiously avoids the use of all chemical terms and explanations which, as a chemist, I found irritating, but Hager writes so well that I found the book compulsive reading. Required reading for all students of the history of technology - and twentieth century European history generally.Readers who want the chemistry too should buy The World's Greatest Fix: a History of Nitrogen and Agriculture by G.J. Leigh (1994).Alan E. Comyns

5.0 out of 5 stars Genuinely fascinating

C.J. · 23 September 2021

This is spellbinding. So much on the history of human population growth that I doubt many know. Gloriously written and so wide ranging, you could say you’d read any number of different book topics, such is the breadth on offer.A treat in every sense.

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely fascinating

S. · 21 December 2020

The story of guano, and the tragic story of Fritz Haber all in on book. The history of man and nitrogen.Definitely worth a read.

5.0 out of 5 stars A great story, Brilliantly told

k.a. · 7 April 2020

This is not just a book about science, it is a book that spans to gamut of the human experience Thomas Hager takes you on an epic journey From the mines of South America to the streets of Berlin and everything in between. From life and death, love and hate, success and failure, salvation and destruction. Highly recommeded

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting story

M.W. · 12 June 2019

Very interesting story. Superbly researched, and well written.

Amazing book

a.l. · 14 December 2023

Paints a great picture on what it takes to make a revolutionary technology work as well as the true role of nitrogen fertilizers in our lives. Recommended reading for anyone.

One of the best books I have ever read, it's the story of “the most important discovery ever made"

S.J. · 22 February 2022

50% of the nitrogen in our bodies came from the Haber–Bosch process. It’s in every protein and every strand of DNA. Ponder that — “half of the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.”I just finished Hager’s Alchemy of Air, the story of “the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life-and-death importance for the largest number of people. Put simply, this discovery is keeping alive half the people on earth.”The Haber-Bosch process catalyzes the production of ammonia (NH3) from N2 and H2 gas. We need “fixed nitrogen”, available to our organic chemistries as atomic nitrogen. It is the limiting factor for the growth of all food. While nitrogen gas is about 80% of our atmosphere, not one atom of it is available for our use when tightly bound by the triple bond of N2 gas, the strongest chemical bond in nature. It is sequestered all around us. In nature, N2 is liberated to atomic nitrogen in small amounts by lightning strikes (it needs 1000°C) and slowly by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. Hager argues that if we reverted to relying on just those natural sources, three billion people would die of starvation in short order — our soils simply could not produce enough food for the mouths now on Earth.Historically, fixed nitrogen came from manure and compost, the first supply to be used up. Once local bat caves were depleted, the world looked for new sources. In 1850, the Chinchas Islands off the coast of Pisco, Peru became the most valuable real estate on Earth. They were covered by centuries of bird guano, excavated by slave labor in a hellish scene. Guano became 75% of the GDP of Peru by 1859. But the world wanted more. In 1856, the U.S. passed the Guano Islands Act, whereby anyone could annex a guano island they found anywhere in the world and make it a U.S. territory. Then the Guano War of 1863 broke out between Spain and Peru and Chile. Darwin had discovered peculiar nitrate deposits in high Atacama Desert of Chile. And by 1900, Chile was supplying 2/3 of all fertilizer on Earth. The Chilean harbor was the location of the first major sea battle of World War I, between France and Germany. The nitrate supply was essential to war-making. “They later called World War I the chemist’s war.” As we saw in the massive explosion recently in Lebanon, fixed nitrogen can also be used to make explosives or provide the “N” in TNT or nitroglycerine.As a latecomer to the nationhood, Germany did not have colonies to exploit for food or fuel, and their shipping lanes were vulnerable to foreclosure by the British navy. Germany’s chemical companies undertook a major effort to pull fixed nitrogen from the air, to support local food production and the munitions of war. “BASF’s nitrogen project grew into the biggest scientific effort in history, comparable in scale to the Manhattan Project in WWII.” The goal was to find a catalyst that could assist with the required chemistries by reducing the temperature and pressure required to something that could be economically feasible in an industrial plant. After 20,000 experiments, running through the periodic table, they discovered osmium could do the trick, and BASF cornered the market for this rare element, but even that would not be enough for the volumes needed. Then they found uranium, and finally, a more reasonable iron-aluminum-calcium combination. The factories required staggeringly huge pressure vessels, like had never seen before.We use the same catalysts today, in a codependency with the petrochemical economy of byproducts and waste heat. The Haber process consumes 4% of the world's natural-gas production and 1.5% of the world's energy supply.Half of the nitrogen in fertilizer is taken up by plants, much of the rest washes out. Fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi river has doubled nitrates in the the Gulf of Mexico, making it look like chocolate milk with an enormous Dead Zone. In Europe, the annual 1.5b tons of nitrogen fertilizer runoff from the Rhine has made the Baltic Sea one of the most polluted marine systems on Earth.Even our atmosphere has become a “huge fertilizer silo, with tons of growth-promoting fertilizers showering from the sky. The amount of fixed nitrogen filtering down to earth in some places has risen so high that it equals the amount American farmers typically apply to their spring wheat.” Nitrogen oxides also create acid rain.We have become dependent on fertilizer. To recap, “while the population nearly quadrupled during the twentieth century, food production — thanks first to Haber-Bosch, second to improved genetic strains of rice and wheat — increased more than sevenfold. That is the simple math behind today’s era of plenty.”

Very well-researched and fascinating to read.

H.L. · 2 September 2024

A mixture of science and history. I worked at BASF R&D doing similar chemistry at high pressure and feel humbled by the achievements of Bosch. It is a privilege to have worked at a site that gave so much to the world. Nowadays we have little idea of how difficult it was to get it done and simply take it for granted.

buen libro

A. · 21 May 2019

el libro llego bien, el libro se ve bueno aunque no lo he leido.

Una joya.

c. · 4 April 2018

Este libro no tiene desperdicio. Desde el Guano hasta las plantas de combustible artificial utilizadas por Alemania antes y durante la ww2. La narrativa es excelente y el contenido arrollador. Un libro de referencia como síntesis de un problema que sigue afectando a toda la humanidad: los fertilizantes.

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The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

Name: The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
Brand: Crown
SKU: K0307351793
Price: 9.70 BHD
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Rating: 4.6 (13 reviews)

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