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.