The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - V of V

Albert Einstein, already living abroad, observed Haber’s suffering but felt little sympathy. Einstein’s earlier disdain for all things German had hardened, under the influence of events, into fierce loathing. His letters to Haber display the satisfaction of a man who’d finally won a long-running argument. “I can imagine your inner conflicts,” he wrote to Haber in May 1933. “It is somewhat like having to abandon a theory on which you have worked for your whole life. It’s not the same for me because I never believed in it in the least.

Haber was plagued by depression, physical weakness, and a failing heart. He died in 1934, broken, unable to work in his native country which he had served so loyally, unable to work in another country since it was reluctant to accept him. The deepest tragedy in this was the fact that his destruction was, in part, self-destruction - he had led the pro-German chorus during the WWI. 

As the years passed, Haber’s work during World War I grew into a symbol of science’s uneasy conscience about its workings. Before Haber, soldiers had never relied so heavily on the latest products of science and industry. Never before had research institutes worked so closely with military leaders. Scientists and generals alike began to understand that their once-distant worlds were linked forever. Gas warfare became one symbol of this union. 

Haber represented the first of a breed. He was the forerunner of every modern scientist who works on banned weapons — at least those weapons, such as nuclear bombs, that international treaties allow in a few privileged nations but not in others. And the moral choices that he confronted during his life were not so different from those that we face today. He was not an evil man. His defining traits — loyalty, intelligence, generosity, industry, and creativity — have always been prized traits. 

Scientists abroad marveled at the German marriage of science and warfare, and rushed to imitate it. The United States set up a National Research Council and began a crash program to build nitrate factories of its own. It spent $100 million on them (about $1.6 billion today) by the end of the WWI which forged enduring links between universities and the military. Philosopher John Dewey called this interweaving of science and government policy a kind of borrowed “Prussianism” and predicted that it would remain even after the war had ended and so it has proved. Haber was the spiritual father of the military-industrial complex. 

Some time after the war, Haber's institute had made an insecticide called Zyklon A, a cyanide-based crystal that turned into vapor when exposed to air. Haber helped arrange funding for their laboratory. Later the concerned scientists moved to another laboratory where they upgraded it to Zyklon B. After Haber’s death, came the horrors of WWII. The Nazis built human-scale gas chambers and used Zyclon B as a tool of death on a scale beyond all normal imagination. Members of Fritz Haber’s extended family, children of his sisters and cousins, were hauled to those camps and killed by a gas their famous relative had helped develop.

If German politics had turned out differently, Fritz Haber might have been considered a hero, and statues of him might now stand in prominent places. Instead, Haber became a tragic figure. Haber's motivations may seem misguided, but before we rush to condemn, we have to remember that most of us behave in the same way. Most people, now as then, swim with the current of public sentiment; most embrace technical progress; most support their homelands. Haber too was guided by these motivations but his superior intelligence and drive meant that he went further and more dramatically than most. 

Haber embodied the capacity of science to nourish life and destroy it. The legacy of this forgotten scientist is present in every day’s news headlines and in every bite of food. Nitrogen is essential in war and in peace and the chemical reaction that Haber discovered delivered unlimited quantities of it. You could say that Haber snatched bread and bombs from the atmosphere. Ultimately the same person who saved billions of lives is also responsible for the deaths of millions of people. 

The institute in Berlin that once was Fritz Haber’s domain bears his name: The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. The name is mildly controversial at the institute; occasionally someone suggests that it be changed. Matthias Scheffler, one of the institute’s five directors,  prefers to keep the name. It reminds every scientist at the institute that knowledge can be a tool for good and for evil, for creation and destruction. A high school in Berlin that once bore Haber’s name did drop it a few years ago.  In Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare, Daniel Charles says about why most people tend to ignore his memory: 

The reason, I suspect, is that he fits no convenient category. Haber was both hero and villain; a Jew who was also a German patriot; a victim of the Nazis who was accused of war crimes himself. Unwilling to admire him, unable to condemn him, most people found it easier to look away.

Clara Immerwahr, Fritz Haber's first wife, has found fame in recent decades. The Clara Immerwahr Award launched by UniSysCat (Unifying Systems in Catalysis) in 2011, is an award for promoting equity and excellence in catalysis research fostering young female scientists at an early stage of their career. Haber's institute, The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society had a memorial built for Clara in the garden of the institute in 2006.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - IV of V

Haher considered the horror evoked by the use of poison gas irrational. He saw no reason why asphyxiation should be considered more ghastly than, for instance, having one’s leg blown off and gradually bleeding to death. He viewed war, and gas in particular, with the cool eye of the technocrat. He thought of gas warfare as an intellectual challenge, or an intricate game that had more psychological impact. 

Haber argued that the psychological power of traditional weapons was quickly spent as soldiers quickly got used to them. Chemicals, on the other hand, represented a many-faceted and ever-changing threat. Each new poison thus posed a new lethal threat, and a new psychic challenge to the foe, “unsettling the soul.” They produced, as he noted enthusiastically in 1925, “more fright and less destruction!”  Gas worked to the advantage of the most advanced industrial societies, Haber argued. He knew well enough that his weapons were widely hated, but he dismissed it. He saw only one explanation for it: prejudice against anything new and disruptive.

As Germany’s economy crumbled and its political system came apart at the seams after the war and the crippling demands of the Treaty of Versailles, Haber suffered as well. It was a time of honor and dishonor. One day he feared being placed on trial as a war criminal; the next he received science’s most prestigious prize. He also encountered moral condemnation from an old acquaintance who was appalled by the use of poison gas. Haber sent a brief, dismissive response, suggesting that his hostility to chemical weapons was outdated and that use of such weapons was legal. The acquaintance wrote back, asking Haber to consider not just whether gas weapons were legal, but also whether they were moral:

I hoped that you might agree with this view: That we, as chemists, have a special responsibility in the future to point out the dangers of modern technology, and in so doing to promote peaceful relations in Europe, since the devastation of another war would be almost unthinkable.

Haber was angry at the world. He considered himself and his country victims of political persecution. The Versailles Treaty prohibited German chemical weapons, but they did not prohibit the victors from researching into them. Haber was quite ready to violate the treaty’s terms if he could get away with it.  When the British chemist Harold Hartley, acting as an international arms inspector, arrived at Haber’s institute in 1921 to check for research on forbidden weapons, Haber probably did not tell him about a nearby laboratory that routinely worked with banned chemicals that Germany had once used as weapons.

Fritz Haber had written off the possibility of getting a Nobel prize. Members of the Nobel Committee in Stockholm, however, understood the enormous significance of the ammonia synthesis. When the news arrived in mid-November 1919 that he had won the prize after all, Haber seemed happier for his country than for himself. But it led to an immediate howl of indignation, particularly in Belgium and France, who had been at the receiving end of the as warfare. There were no protests at the ceremony itself though many Allied diplomats and Nobel laureates found reasons not to attend. 

Events of the 1920s and his own increasing age forced Haber, more frequently as the years passed, to reflect on the past. In a speech to Breslau’s Academic-Literary Association, he recalled the naive complacency of his youth when he had felt that his Jewish ancestry did not matter. He spoke of unthinking German patriotism and how the war destroyed both prosperity and illusions of national unity. He ended his speech with a plea for tolerance, intellectual freedom, and democracy. 

As Hitler’s movement swelled in power, Haber’s mood grew dark. On occasion, he even seemed to question technical progress which he had always believed in. Early in 1932, he confessed that the previous half-century’s technical innovations appeared to be merely “fire in the hands of small children.” One year later, Adolf Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor, and Haber wrote in a letter that he had "the feeling that I’ve made serious mistakes in life." He did not say what those mistakes had been.

He dimly foresaw Germany’s political catastrophe but he never imagined that it could strip him so completely of his dearest possessions and turn his proudest accomplishments into ashes. What counted now was ancestry alone and Haber’s forebodings became reality. The government unveiled a law ordering the removal within six months of all Jews from the German civil service.  The law covered every German university professor and nearly every scientist at the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

Haber, too, soon would find his situation intolerable. Apart from Einstein, who was traveling at the time and immediately declared that he wasn’t coming back to Germany, Haber was the most prominent Jewish scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Max Planck, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, tried to save Haber by trying to convince the führer that forcing valuable Jews to emigrate amounted to Germany’s “self- mutilation" but Hitler flew into such a rage that Planck could only leave the room.

The remainder of Haber’s life is a chronicle of losses: his villa and institute, his fortune, and his remaining reserves of strength. Equally shattering, though, was a kind of spiritual dispossession, the loss of his faith and identity. He’d helped feed the ravenous beast that was turning on him. “I am bitter as never before, and the feeling that this is unbearable increases by the day.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - III of V

One of the scientists who Haber persuaded to join him was Albert Einstein. He had the opposite mind-set to that of Haber though they always remained good friends. Einstein was all critique, disdainful of conventional wisdom and established institutions, scornful of ties to community or nation. As a teenager, he had taken the remarkable step of formally renouncing his German nationality. In a letter to his cousin, Einstein composed this devastating portrait of his new friend:

Haber’s picture unfortunately is to be seen everywhere. It pains me every time I think of it. Unfortunately, I have to accept that this otherwise so splendid man has succumbed to personal vanity and not even of the most tasteful kind. This defect is in fact generally and unfortunately a Berlin kind. 

The full story of Haber’s activities during World War I will never be told, for the records have disappeared. But the outlines can be pieced together. Haber persuaded military officers to adopt new technology, cajoled industrial executives into meeting the government’s demands, and assigned scientists the task of solving military problems. No process existed that would convert large amounts of ammonia (NH3) into nitric acid (HNO3). There are hints in fragments of surviving correspondence that he began proposing producing nitrate from ammonia by a previously unproven method.  

Factories were built for making nitrate for making munitions and bombs. Haber’s ammonia-making process was now feeding the machines of war. A manifesto signed by many German intellectuals was published which absolved Germany from any responsibility for the war (Germany had entered WWI as an aggressor), asserted that Germany was victim, not aggressor. It repudiated those who argued that German society had been hijacked by a military cult. One of the signatories was Fritz Haber. 

Albert Einstein was among the very few who did not sign it, rejecting allegiance to his nation and its young men in battle. He called the war “madness” and blamed Germany’s “religious faith in power” for provoking it. He signed a counter-manifesto calling for European unity and an end to the war. He watched with horror as fellow German scientists, Haber in the lead, laid their skills at the altar of Germany’s war efforts. “Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally,” Einstein wrote in 1917, “could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal.” 

His friend Fritz Haber, meanwhile was working on producing poison gas. The challenge of chemical warfare, in its marriage of the scientific and practical worlds, was the sort at which Haber excelled. Other scientists like Albert Einstein had produced more profound intellectual insights. None, however, possessed Haber’s talent for human organization, and these were the skills that war demanded. When dealing with military matters, Haber learned to “think like a general”

He suggested releasing clouds of chlorine gas, carried to the front lines in pressurized tanks and released when the wind was favorable. He felt that this could asphyxiate soldiers in enemy trenches. Use of poison gas shocked each of Europe’s armed camps and led to imitation by everyone. On the German side, there was celebration and long-sought military honors for Fritz Haber who was promoted to officer grade. 

Sometime between April 24 and April 29, 1915, Fritz Haber returned to Berlin.  It was a quick visit, lasting only until May 2. Nobody knows what happened but on the night of May 1–2, Clara Haber found her husband’s army-issued pistol, shot herself with it, and died. Fritz Haber, obeying his orders, returned the next day to the front lines of combat. Hermann, just twelve years old, was left behind without mother or father. Clara’s final choice became in many minds a condemnation of her husband’s hand in killing.

By mid-1915, Fritz Haber was Germany’s czar of gas warfare. Haber commandeered all the empty laboratories he could find, surrounding them with barbed wire and military guards and filling them with a swirl of research on new poisons and gas masks. By 1917, Haber’s empire encompassed 1,500 people, including 150 scientists, with a budget fifty times larger than the institute’s peacetime level. He experimented with phosgene and mustard gas. Haber's conception of himself at this time is revealed by a quote: 

I was one of the mightiest men in Germany. I was more than a great army commander, more than a captain of industry. I was the founder of industries; my work was essential for the economic and military expansion of Germany. All doors were open to me

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - II of V

Haber had known a woman named Clara Immerwahr for a decade. She was the first woman ever to acquire a doctorate from Breslau’s university. In the visible facts of their life, Haber and Clara had much in common. Both had grown up within Breslau’s Jewish community, though neither had ever been religiously observant.  Clara was two years younger. Haber persuaded her to link her life with his but she was filled with misgivings. Clara initially turned down Haber’s proposal, saying that she “wasn’t the right sort for marriage” before finally accepting it. In August of 1901, Fritz and Clara were married.

For Haber, marriage was one more step along the path he’d already been traveling. He threw himself into research with even greater passion. For Clara, on the other hand, it provoked a crisis of identity. She had abandoned her tenuous position in the world of science and had become a professor’s wife, responsible for running a household, cooking, cleaning, washing, and mending. She felt trapped, unable to pursue her intellectual passions and unable to find satisfaction in her newly assigned role.

They had a son in 1902 who was named Hermann. Throughout his life, Fritz Haber never really found domestic peace or a stable balance between professional and family life. He sometimes spoke of family as something confining, as the enemy of true friendship and the “murderer of talent.” Clara Haber’s letters display a striking contrast in tone. When discussing chemistry, or professional disputes among colleagues, her writing is animated, lively, and confident. When the topic turns to domestic and personal affairs, she seems frustrated and frequently seized by dark moods.

The breadth of Haber's interests continued to amaze and confound his colleagues. During 1904 and 1905, Haber published seventeen different papers in half a dozen different journals. He wrote one more book, his last and most successful one, called Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions. Haber had become by this time one of the most accomplished physical chemists in all of Germany. He seemed to recognize no limits either to his time or his talents. But his home life was not too happy. Clara saw limits and dangers where Fritz saw none. His inability to economize, either with time or money, produced constant friction. 

He then discovered a chemical reaction that would shape an epoch. It was known that plants needed nitrogen to ensure proper growth and atmospheric nitrogen was not available to them. Haber turned his attention to finding out such a reaction due to a fortuitous set of circumstances. One was scientific rivalry with a scientist named Walther Nernst who was a dominant figure in their field. Haber envied Nernst, and resented him because he had slighted him for earlier research into fixing atmospheric nitrogen. 

An extraordinary scientist named Robert Le Rossignol joined Haber’s laboratory and helped in the design of new experimental equipment. He then acquired a compressor that was able to squeeze  mixtures of hydrogen and nitrogen gas to pressures two hundred times greater than normal atmospheric pressure along with extreme heat. Finally, Haber acquired a new and powerful industrial partner,  BASF, Germany’s largest chemical company. The BASF funded Haber personally and if Haber’s work led to commercial production, he was to receive royalty payments equal to 10 percent of the company’s net profits from his discoveries.

The third week of March 1909 brought the miracle. Haber combined nitrogen and hydrogen to produce ammonia. Essentially the same process that Haber discovered is being followed even now in much larger equipments. Worldwide, nearly a hundred million tons of nitrogen are now taken from the air each year, converted into ammonia, and spread across the surface of the earth as fertilizer. About half the people on earth could not survive in the absence of the chemical reaction discovered by Haber. 

But the problem with most biological processes is that the benefits are immediately apparent but the costs are long term and thus remain hidden for a long time. Nitrates pollute groundwater supplies in many farming areas. Nitrogen oxides in the air turn into ozone, harming both humans and plant life. Leftover fertilizer is slowly killing streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the northern hemisphere. Runaway nutrients from farmers’ fields are feeding blooms of algae that cloud the water, suck up oxygen, and suffocate fish. When the fish die, birds that feed on them soon disappear. Plant species that thrive in the presence of nitrogen start growing uncontrollably, crowding out other plants. The result is a depleted ecosystem, supporting a less rich and complex web of life.

But this is not the end of Haber's story. The reclusive banker Leopold Koppel wanted to setup a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for physical chemistry. He wanted Fritz Haber to become the institute’s founding director. In negotiations with the government, he made sure that Haber’s institute would be allowed to apply for patents on its discoveries. Never again would his life be fully devoted to personally exploring mysteries of the material world because of the logistical challenge of building and running his institute, hiring scientists, and managing its budget. 

He was attracted by Berlin’s symbols of power, honor, and national influence and he never seriously considered leaving it. As a member of the nation’s elite, he also accepted its assumptions: that his nation, surrounded by enemies, demanded his loyalty; that its growing military might serve the cause of peace; that the nation, if united, could never be defeated. The state’s goals defined his own.  Nation, government, and emperor, in Haber’s mind, were one. He was honored and duty-bound to serve them.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - I of V

The dependence on guano and nitrates was ended by the Haber-Bosch process which is a source of limitless nitrogen. It takes nitrogen from the air and links it to hydrogen, “fixing” it in the form of ammonia. Ammonia is plant food but it is often converted into other forms that farmers can handle more easily. Today, about half of all the nitrogen consumed by all the world’s crops each year comes not from natural sources such as bacteria in the soil, but from ammonia factories employing the Haber-Bosch process. But Fritz Haber's story is complicated. 

Haber was born in 1868 into a large and tightly knit Jewish clan. His mother died 3 weeks after giving birth to him. He grew into a talkative, energetic teenager, an enthusiastic student but not a spectacularly gifted one. After his schooling he decided that he wanted to study chemistry. As a teenager, Haber had already begun homemade experiments, some of them dangerous. In 1886, he headed for the university in Berlin.

Before 1871, there was no country named Germany. After the formation of the State, Germans considered mastery of science and technology to be among their great strengths. Any industrial success, scientific breakthrough, or new rail link was cause for celebration because it was viewed as contribution to the strength and status of the nation. Of all the sciences, Chemistry was the science that was most closely linked to Germany’s rise. 

Fritz Haber was part of the first generation of Prussian Jews in a thousand years who could imagine that their Jewish heritage might not create any major hurdles in life. The newly formed country had abolished all restrictions on civil rights based on “religious difference.” Jews became teachers, civil servants, and were elected to public office. Discrimination persisted, and anti-Jewish campaigns erupted from time to time, but for Fritz Haber, all opportunities seemed open and he was eager to grab them. 

But when he went to Berlin, Haber found mostly frustration and disappointment. He found the lectures confusing and the chemical experiments trivial and unchallenging. All the complicated ideas flying past his ears left him feeling intimidated. German students were free to go from one university to the next before eventually taking the final examination required for their degree. After one year in Berlin, Haber moved to Heidelberg, in southwest Germany, where he liked it no better. 

Haber approached his twentieth birthday, and with it the prospect of military duty. Any young man who’d attended university could serve a one-year term in the military, as long as he paid all his own costs. Fritz was among the privileged few. In 1888, with his father paying the bills, he joined a field artillery regiment stationed in his hometown of Breslau. There was great social status that came with military rank in Haber’s Germany. It embodied honored German virtues of discipline and duty. No matter what career one pursued, an officer’s uniform was a social mark of distinction. 

Haber found the details of military life — the constant orders, the “noisy desolation” of the firing range, the never-changing routine — tiresome and odious. But for the rest of his life, his personal habits — the way he walked, stood, and spoke — paid unconscious homage to military custom and discipline. He wanted to become an officer but was not selected. At that time, no Prussian Jew had ever become a reserve officer, except in the medical corps. 

He swallowed his disappointment and went back to university studies in Berlin. He still had no idea what he really wanted to do. Haber met a fellow student named Richard Abegg who introduced him to the specialty within chemistry, called physical chemistry, in which Haber eventually would make his reputation. It was a brand-new field, and Haber hadn’t encountered it before but again he failed to get selected. His teachers didn’t seem to notice the qualities that others later praised so highly. 

After many odd jobs, Haber finally decided that he would pursue a career as an academic scientist. In December 1894, he was hired as an assistant in the Technical University of Karlsruhe’s technical-chemical institute. The university’s chemistry institute had solid funding from the local government and intimate relations with the country’s largest chemical company, the Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik, known as the BASF. 

From the beginning, Haber seemed to master a field overnight and challenged electrochemistry's established authorities. He published a new textbook on electrochemistry which was praised as a novel synthesis of electrochemistry’s two distinct sides, the practical and the theoretical. Similarly, he became the university’s expert in the field of dyes and chemicals, a field he had not studied before. When asked how he managed to master such a range of specialties so quickly, Haber replied that he “studied every night until 2 a.m. until I got it.” He was promoted to full professorship. 

Despite his lengthening list of accomplishments, Haber remained an outsider in his chosen field. He compensated by working even harder and asserting himself even more strongly. He developed a thin skin, a special sensitivity to slights. He feuded with other scientists, and when criticized he responded sharply. Some resented his ambition and drive. 

Guano - II of II

Other countries also used their desire for guano as a reason to expand their empires. The United Kingdom claimed Kiritimati and Malden Island for the British Empire. Other nations that claimed guano islands included Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and Mexico. Guano ended up at the centre of several conflicts. Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Spain went to war over guano-producing land, borders and taxes. Guano also helped to fuel the First World War thanks to its use as an ingredient in gunpowder.

All this doesn’t mean that guano was unknown before Western nations discovered it. It had been used in agriculture for more than 1,500 years. It was particularly treasured by the Inca Empire. Using bird guano as a fertiliser helped the empire to thrive, sustaining more than eight million people. It was so important to the Inca people that anyone who disturbed the seabirds faced the death penalty. The secret of guano’s fertilising power first spread to Europe in the mid-1500s, following Spain’s arrival and colonisation of South America. Guano’s popularity peaked in the nineteenth century – often called The Guano Age – and continued into the twentieth century. 

These guano islands were not paradises. Guano accumulated only in extremely dry climates where the lack of rainfall allowed bird droppings to collect for centuries. Such islands were unpromising sites for human habitation.  Guano mining — tunneling, picking, and blasting the stuff loose and hauling it to waiting ships — was arguably the single worst job you could have in the nineteenth century. Respiratory diseases, causing workers to pass out or cough up blood, and gastrointestinal ailments were common. 

In all, about four hundred thousand tons of rock guano came off the islands the U.S. owned. Guano didn’t solve the soil exhaustion crisis, but, combined with Chilean sodium nitrates, which companies started selling later in the century, it held it at bay. Mined fertilizers kept industrial agriculture sustainable long enough for scientists to devise a more permanent solution. Demand for guano rapidly declined after 1910 with the development of the Haber–Bosch process for extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Guano mining continues in Chile with the annual guano production in Chile ranging from 2,091 to 4,601 metric tons per year in the 2014–2023 period. With the rising popularity of organic food in the twenty-first century, the demand for guano has started to rise again.

But our demand for guano has also taken a toll on the birds that make it. At the peak of guano mining, it is estimated that that Peru’s coasts and islands were home to some 53 million seabirds. But guano mining sent some seabird populations spiraling into decline. One estimate states that these same Peruvian seabird populations had dropped to a mere 4.2 million by 2011. In the days of intensive guano extraction, important breeding grounds would have been disturbed by people year after year. Such disturbances cause entire colonies to abandon their nesting sites.

Losing large numbers of seabirds can have devastating consequences. Guano is a vital resource in nature. The nutrients that seabirds transport from marine environments and deposit as guano feeds plants and diverse invertebrate communities. The nutrients also trickle back into the ocean, helping tropical coral reefs to grow and recover from bleaching.

Guano is also the namesake for one of the nucleobases in RNA and DNA: guanine which was first obtained from guano. 

Guano - I of II

In 1857, the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no indigenous populations and, at the time, no strategic value. They tended to be remote, rocky, and rainless but they had the one thing that everyone in the nineteenth century badly wanted. They had “white gold,” - guano - better known as bird shit.

In the nineteenth century, land fertility started suffering because of the lack of nitrogen. Nitrogen makes up nearly four-fifths of the earth’s atmosphere by volume but it is almost exclusively  dinitrogen (N2) which is unreactive and thus inaccessible to plants. The bacteria that inhabit the nodules of the roots of some legumes can convert it into a form usable by plants. It took chemists until the nineteenth century to piece all that together. 

But farmers, in their own way, had comprehended it for millennia. All agricultural traditions require methods for managing nitrogen flows. Nitrogen-rich manures are spread, crops rotated, forests burned, fields left fallow, or lentils planted. These complex systems faltered, however, in the nineteenth century. Farms that used to grow a rotating variety of crops for local consumption started focusing on the most profitable crops and grew them for distant markets. Single-crop farms yielded diminishing returns due to what was called “Soil exhaustion”.  

Farmers used various items for organic material that could be spread on their fields to replenish them like rapeseed cake, linseed cake, malt dust, straw, spoiled hay, oats, putrefied animal remains etc. What did work was guano. That term can refer to any bird or bat feces used as fertilizer, but the guano on everyone’s minds was the nitrogen-rich droppings of cormorants, boobies, and pelicans on the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. The guano piled hundreds of feet high and baked in the sun, so that the very rock of the islands was centuries’ worth of calcified bird droppings.

Guano's sharp, ammoniacal smell was notorious, perceptible from miles off. And yet, sprinkled in small quantities over the farms of North America that were nitrogen-starved, the stuff worked miracles. Huge demand drove up the cost. So did the tight control of the supply by British firms that monopolized guano exports from the Chinchas and kept prices high. The “guano question” came up again and again in the US Congress.

Guano entrepreneurs hastily formed the American Guano Company, with a capitalization of $10 million (all federal expenditures in 1850 totaled less than $45 million). The US passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. Under its terms, whenever a U.S. citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.” This meant that those islands would, in some way, belong to the country. This Act is the reason why the USA has so many territories in the Pacific today. 

Ian Fleming' novel, Doctor No is set on a guano island. When James Bond first arrives in Jamaica, the colonial secretary sits him down for a lecture on guano’s history (“Bond prepared to be bored”) which lasts an entire chapter. The secretary starts with the British-Peruvian monopoly and works his way up to Fritz Haber’s invention of ammonia synthesis. The point, as he comes to it, is that there are small, uninhabited islands scattered around the Caribbean. And one has been purchased by a mysterious international figure, Doctor Julius No.

At the end of the novel, Bond defeats Doctor No by burying him in a guano pit, the villain’s “screaming lungs stuffing with the filthy dust” until he dies. In the 1962 film version, however, there is no trace of guano. Doctor No’s base is powered by a nuclear reactor, and Bond triumphs in the end by triggering a meltdown, drowning Doctor No in the pool containing the overheating reactor and wrecking the island.