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.
