Fritz Haber

Fritz Jakob Haber (; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population. For this work, Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history. Haber also, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.

Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement, to develop the Zyklon B pesticide used for the killing of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust.

Following the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, Haber resigned from his position. Already in poor health, he spent time in various countries before Chaim Weizmann invited him to become the director of the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, Mandatory Palestine. He accepted the offer but died of heart failure mid-journey in a hotel in Basel, Switzerland on 29 January 1934, aged 65.

Early life and education

Haber was born in Breslau, Kingdom of Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland), into a well-off Jewish family. Haber's father Siegfried was a well-known merchant in the town, who had founded his own business in dye pigments, paints and pharmaceuticals. When Haber was about six years old, Siegfried remarried to Hedwig Hamburger. Siegfried and his second wife had three daughters: Else, Helene, and Frieda. Although his relationship with his father was distant and often difficult owing to Fritz being associated with the death of his first wife, Haber developed close relationships with his stepmother and his half-sisters.

By the time Fritz was born, the Habers had to some extent become assimilated into German society. He attended primary school at the Johanneum School, a "simultaneous school" open equally to Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish students. Haber received his doctorate cum laude from Friedrich Wilhelm University in May 1891, after presenting his work to a board of examiners from the University of Berlin, since Charlottenburg was not yet accredited to grant doctorates.

Bunte suggested that Haber examine the thermal decomposition of hydrocarbons. By making careful quantitative analyses, Haber was able to establish that "the thermal stability of the carbon-carbon bond is greater than that of the carbon-hydrogen bond in aromatic compounds and smaller in aliphatic compounds", a classic result in the study of pyrolysis of hydrocarbons. This work became Haber's habilitation thesis. This would change in 1913, when Carl Bosch, a German chemist with a focus in pressure chemistry, scaled the production to industrial levels. This new process, now named the Haber-Bosch process, was much more efficient as new methods were discovered. This new method made use of a more refined iron catalyst, instead of the uranium or osmium catalyst that were used prior. By decreasing temperature, but increasing pressure, it was discovered that the rate at which ammonia was formed was increased. With an increase in production and cheaper materials being used during production, products that had a nitrogen base, such as fertilizer, became mass producible. Synthetic fertilizers allowed for the production of better, healthier crops at faster speeds. This increase in output allowed farmers to grow more food with the same amount of land in the same amount of time compared to before the use of fertilizers. By increasing output of food, it effectively allowed population rates to grow at speeds that weren’t possible or sustainable throughout history.

However, the use of synthetic fertilizers does have lasting impacts on the area around them. The use of synthetic fertilizers helps crops, but when exposed to bodies of water through runoff or other methods, it can have detrimental effects on local wildlife. The now nitrogen rich water creates an opportunity for algae blooms to form. This often harms the local fauna due to oxygen being removed from the water by the algae, causing areas of water that contain no oxygen.

Nobel Prize

During his time at University of Karlsruhe from 1894 to 1911, Haber and his assistant Robert Le Rossignol invented the Haber–Bosch process, which is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under conditions of high temperature and pressure. This discovery was a direct consequence of Le Châtelier's principle, announced in 1884, which states that when a system is in equilibrium and one of the factors affecting it is changed, the system will respond by minimizing the effect of the change. Since it was known how to decompose ammonia in the presence of a nickel-based catalyst, one could derive from Le Châtelier's principle that the reaction could be reversed to produce ammonia at high temperature and pressure. (Actually the reaction's equilibria is improved at low temperatures which resulted in the need for a catalyst. At high temperatures, ammonia decomposes to its elements.)

To further develop the process for large-scale ammonia production, Haber turned to industry. Partnering with Carl Bosch at BASF, the process was successfully scaled up to produce commercial quantities of ammonia. The Haber–Bosch process was a milestone in industrial chemistry. The production of nitrogen-based products such as fertilizer and chemical feedstocks, which was previously dependent on acquisition of ammonia from limited natural deposits, now became possible using an easily available and abundant base: atmospheric nitrogen. The ability to produce much larger quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizers in turn supported much greater agricultural yields, supporting half the world's population.

The annual world production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is currently more than 100 million tons. The food base of half the current world population is based on the Haber–Bosch process.

Haber was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work (he actually received the award in 1919).

In his acceptance speech for that Nobel Prize Haber commented "It may be that this solution is not the final one. Nitrogen bacteria teach us that Nature, with her sophisticated forms of the chemistry of living matter, still understands and utilizes methods which we do not as yet know how to imitate."

Haber was also active in the research on 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 Electrochemistry 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).

World War I

Haber greeted World War I with enthusiasm, joining 92 other German intellectuals in signing the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in October 1914, a proclamation that galvanized support for the war in German schools and universities. Haber played a major role in the development of the non-ballistic use of chemical warfare in World War I, in spite of the proscription of their use in shells by the Hague Convention of 1907 (to which Germany was a signatory). He was promoted to the rank of captain and made head of the Chemistry Section in the Ministry of War soon after the war began. Haber was on hand personally when it was first released by the German military at the Second Battle of Ypres (22 April to 25 May 1915) in Belgium. Haber also helped to develop gas masks with adsorbent filters which could protect against such weapons.

A special troop was formed for gas warfare (Pioneer Regiments 35 and 36) under the command of Otto Peterson, with Haber and Friedrich Kerschbaum as advisors. Haber actively recruited physicists, chemists, and other scientists to be transferred to the unit. Future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn served as gas troops in Haber's unit.

Gas warfare in World War I 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.

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, which Haber had been denied 25 years earlier during his compulsory 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 and referred to history: "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".

Haber received much criticism for his involvement in the development of chemical weapons in pre-World War II Germany, both from contemporaries, especially Albert Einstein, and from modern-day scientists.

Between World Wars

From 1919 to 1923 Haber continued to be involved in Germany's secret development of chemical weapons, working with Hugo Stoltzenberg, and helping both Spain and Russia in the development of chemical gases.

From 1919 to 1925, in response to a request made by German ambassador Wilhelm Solf to Japan for Japanese support for German scholars in times of financial hardship, a Japanese businessman named Hoshi Hajime, the president of Hoshi Pharmaceutical Company, donated two million Reichsmark to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society as the 'Japan Fund' (Hoshi-Ausschuss). Haber was asked to manage the fund, and was invited by Hoshi to Japan in 1924. Haber offered a number of chemical licences to Hoshi's company, but the offers were refused. The money from the Fund was used to support the work of Richard Willstätter, Max Planck, Otto Hahn, Leo Szilard, and others.

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 that reported by earlier researchers, and that gold extraction from sea water was uneconomic.

By 1931, Haber was increasingly concerned about the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and the possible safety of his friends, associates, and family. Under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933, Jewish scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society were particularly targeted. The ("Journal for all natural sciences") charged that "The founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Dahlem was the prelude to an influx of Jews into the physical sciences. The directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry was given to the Jew, F. Haber, the nephew of the big-time Jewish profiteer Koppel". (Koppel was not actually related to Haber.) On 2 May 1915, following an argument with Haber, Clara died of suicide in their garden by shooting herself in the heart with his service revolver. She did not die immediately, and was found by her 12-year-old son, Hermann, who had heard the shot. Haber left within days for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russian Army. Originally buried in Dahlem, Clara's remains were later transferred at her husband's request to Basel, where she is buried next to him.

Fritz Haber's other son, Ludwig Fritz Haber (1921–2004), became an eminent British economist and wrote a history of chemical warfare in World War I, The Poisonous Cloud (1986). Hermann's daughter Eva lived in Kenya for many years, returning to England in the 1950s. She died in 2015, leaving three children, five grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. Several members of Haber's extended family died in Nazi concentration camps, including his half-sister Frieda's daughter, Hilde Glücksmann, her husband, and their two children. Repeated angina attacks can cause lasting damage which likely contributed to his death the next year.

In 1933, during Haber's brief sojourn in England, Chaim Weizmann offered him the directorship at the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, in Mandatory Palestine. He accepted, and left for the Middle East in January 1934, travelling with his half-sister, Else Haber Freyhahn.

Estate and legacy

Haber bequeathed his extensive private library to the Sieff Institute, where it was dedicated as the Fritz Haber Library on 29 January 1936. Hermann Haber helped to move the library and gave a speech at the dedication.

In 1981, the Minerva foundation of the Max Planck Society and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) established the Fritz Haber Research Center for Molecular Dynamics, based at the Institute of Chemistry of the Hebrew University. Its purpose is the promotion of Israeli-German scientific collaboration in the field of Molecular Dynamics. The Center's library is also called Fritz Haber Library, but it is not immediately clear whether there is any connection to the 1936 homonymous library of the Sieff (now Weizmann) Institute.

The institute most closely associated with his work, the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at Dahlem (a suburb of Berlin), was renamed Fritz Haber Institute in 1953 and is part of the Max Planck Society.

Awards and honours

Foreign Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1914)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1918)
President of the German Chemical Society (1923)
Elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (1932)
Honorary Member, USSR Academy of Sciences (1932)

Dramatizations and fictionalizations

The Swedish power metal band Sabaton wrote the song "Father" about Haber.

A fictional description of Haber's life, and in particular his long-term 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. The description of the first reads: from the Diversity Website:

The second play was titled The Greater Good and was first broadcast on 23 October 2008. It was directed by Celia de Wolff and written by Justin Hopper, and starred Anton Lesser as Haber. It explored his work on chemical warfare during World War I 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 titled 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.

In November 2008, Haber was again played by Anton Lesser in Einstein and Eddington.

In January 2012, Radiolab aired a segment on Haber, including the invention of the Haber Process, the Second Battle of Ypres, his involvement with Zyklon A, and the death of his wife, Clara.

In December 2013, Haber was the subject of a BBC World Service radio programme: "Why has one of the world's most important scientists been forgotten?".

His and his wife's life, including their relationship with the Einsteins, and Haber's wife's suicide, are featured prominently in the novel A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell. The characters are named Lenz and Iris Alter.

Haber's life and relationship to Albert Einstein was portrayed in the first season of Genius which aired on National Geographic Channel from 25 April to 27 June 2017.

References

Sources

External links

including the Nobel Lecture, 2 June 1920 The Synthesis of Ammonia from Its Elements
HABER – A biographical film about Fritz Haber
A short biography of Fritz Haber, by Bretislav Friedrich
Fritz Haber, Encyclopædia Britannica
"How do you solve a problem like Fritz Haber" on NPR's Radiolab
Fritz Haber: Jewish chemist whose work led to Zyklon B
Termination of Employment Letter to Ladislaus Farkas from Fritz Haber
Chlorine nitrogen and the legacies of Fritz Haber
The Man Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions