Fritz Haber

For more information on Fritz Haber, visit Britannica.com.

German physical chemist (1868–1934)

Haber, the son of a merchant, was born at Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland. He was educated at Berlin, Heidelberg, Charlottenburg, and Jena, and in 1894 he became an assistant in physical chemistry at the Technical Institute, Karlsruhe, where he remained until 1911, being promoted to a professorship in 1906. He moved to Berlin in 1911 to become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry. Though an intensely patriotic German he was also a Jew and with the rise of anti-Semitism he resigned his post in 1933 and went into exile in England, where he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. He died in Basel en route to Italy.

Haber is noted for his discovery of the industrial process for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. The need at the time was for nitrogen compounds for use as fertilizers – most plants cannot utilize free nitrogen from the air, and need ‘fixed’ nitrogen. The main source was deposits of nitrate salts in Chile, but these would have a limited life.

Haber, in an attempt to solve this problem, began investigating the reaction: N₂ + 3H₂ ≡ 2NH₃

Under normal conditions the yield is very low. Haber (1907–09) showed that practical yields could be achieved at high temperatures (250°C) and pressures (250 atmospheres) using a catalyst (iron is the catalyst now used). The process was developed industrially by Carl Bosch around 1913 and is still the main industrial method for the fixation of nitrogen. Haber received the Nobel Prize for chemistry for this work in 1918.

During World War I, Haber turned his efforts to helping Germany's war effort. In particular he directed the use of poisonous gas. After the war he tried, unsuccessfully, to repay the indemnities imposed on Germany by a process for extracting gold from seawater.

Fritz Haber (1868-1934) won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for developing the Haber process, which produced ammonia. Haber directed Germany's chemical warfare during World War II.

One the foremost chemists of his generation, Fritz Haber's legacy did not end with his considerable achievements of both theoretical and practical value in the fields of physical chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, and engineering. Perhaps of even greater importance were his tireless attempts to promote communication and understanding between scientific communities across the globe. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, under his direction, became famous in the years after World War I as a leading center of research whose seminars attracted scientists from all nations. In his most outstanding contribution to chemistry - for which he won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - Haber found an inexpensive method for synthesizing large quantities of ammonia from its constituent elements nitrogen and hydrogen. A steady supply of ammonia made possible the industrial production of fertilizer and explosives.

Haber was born on December 9, 1868, in Breslau (now known as Wroclaw, Poland), the only child of first cousins Siegfried Haber and Paula Haber. Haber's mother died in childbirth. In 1877, his father, a prosperous importer of dyes and pigments, married Hedwig Hamburger, who bore him three daughters. Haber and his father had a distant relationship, but his stepmother treated him kindly. From a local grade school, Haber went to the St. Elizabeth Gymnasium (high school) in Breslau. There he developed an abiding love of literature, particularly the voluminous writings of Goethe, which inspired him to write verse. Haber also enjoyed acting, considering it as a profession early on before settling on chemistry.

After entering the University of Berlin in 1886 to study chemistry, Haber transferred after a semester to the University of Heidelberg. There, under the supervision of Robert Bunsen (who gave his name to the burner used in laboratories everywhere), Haber delved into physical chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Getting his Ph.D. in 1891, Haber tried working as an industrial laboratory chemist but found its rigid routines too intellectually confining. He decided instead to enter the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, in order to learn about the most advanced chemical engineering techniques of his time, studying under Georg Lunge.

Haber then tried, without success, to work in his father's business, opting after six months to return to academia. In 1894, after a brief stint at the University of Jena, he took an assistant teaching position with Hans Bunte, professor of chemical technology at the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule in Baden. Haber enjoyed Karlsruhe's emphasis on preparing its students for technical positions, stressing the connections between science and industry. His studies led him to investigate the breakdown at high temperatures of organic compounds known as hydrocarbons, an area pioneered by the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot. After correcting and systematizing Berthelot's findings, Haber's results, published in 1896 as a book entitled Experimental Studies on the Decomposition and Combustion of Hydro-carbons, led to his appointment that year as lecturer, a step below associate professor.

Haber married another chemist, Clara Immerwahr, in 1901. They had a son, Hermann, born in June, 1902. While a lecturer, Haber moved his experimental focus from organic chemistry to physical chemistry. Although he lacked a formal education in this area, with the help of a colleague, Hans Luggin, he began to research the effect of electrical currents on fuel cells and the loss of efficiency in steam engines through heat. Haber also devised electrical instruments to measure the loss of oxygen in burning organic compounds, outlining this subject in a book published in 1898, Outline of Technical Electrochemistry on a Theoretical Basis, which earned him a promotion to associate professor. Haber's exceptional abilities as a researcher, which included his precision as a mathematician and writer, induced a leading German science group to send him in 1902 to survey America's approach to chemistry in industry and education.

Haber published a third book, Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions, in 1905. In the volume he applied thermodynamic theory on the behavior of gases to establish industrial requirements for creating reactions. His clear exposition gave him an international reputation as an expert in adapting science to technology. That same year, Haber began his groundbreaking work on the synthesis of ammonia. Europe's growing population had created a demand for an increase in agricultural production. Nitrates, used in industrial fertilizer, required ammonia for their manufacture. Thus, Haber's goal to find new ways to fabricate ammonia grew out of a very pressing need. Other scientists had been synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen but at temperatures of one thousand degrees centigrade, which were not practical for industrial production. Haber was able to get the same reaction but at manageable temperatures of three hundred degrees centigrade.

The chemist Walther Nernst had obtained the synthesis of ammonia with gases at very high pressures. He also had disputed Haber's results for his high-temperature reaction. Goaded by Nernst's skepticism, Haber executed high-pressure experiments and confirmed his earlier calculations. He then combined Nernst's technique with his own to greatly increase the efficiency of the process. To augment the yield even further, Haber found a superior catalyst for the reaction and redirected the heat it produced back into the system to save on the expenditure of energy.

The final step of bringing Haber's work into the factory fell to the engineer Karl Bosch, whose company, Badische Anilin-und Sodafabrik (BASF), had supported Haber's research. After Bosch solved some key problems such as designing containers that could withstand a corrosive process over a period of time, full-scale industrial output began in 1910. Today the Haber-Bosch process is an industry standard for the mass production of ammonia.

In 1912 Haber was appointed director of the newly formed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at Dahlheim, just outside of Berlin; Richard Willstätter and Ernst Beckmann joined as codirectors. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Haber volunteered his laboratory and his expertise to help Germany. At first, he developed alternate sources of anti-freeze. Then, the German War Office consulted both Nernst and Haber about developing a chemical weapon that would drive the enemy out of their trenches in order to resume open warfare. In January, 1915, the German Army began production of a chlorine gas that Haber's team had invented. On April 11, 1915, in the first chemical offensive ever, five thousand cylinders of chlorine gas blanketed 3.5 miles of enemy territory near Ypres, Belgium, resulting in 150, 000 deaths.

Haber hated the war but hoped that in developing the gases he would help to bring it to a speedy end by breaking the deadlock of trench warfare. His wife, however, denounced his work as a perversion of science. After a violent argument with Haber in 1915, she committed suicide. Haber was married again in 1917 to Charlotte Nathan, who bore him a son and a daughter. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1927.

In 1916 Haber was appointed chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, overseeing every detail in that department. His process for developing nitrates from ammonia became incorporated into Germany's manufacture of explosives. Because of his duties as supervisor of chemical warfare, American, French, and British scientists vehemently contested his 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Although many of the Allied scientists had also contributed to the war effort, they charged that Haber was a war criminal for developing chemical weapons.

Since the 1918 prize had been reserved for until after the war ended, Haber accepted his Nobel Prize in November, 1919. Unquestionably, Haber had invented, in the words of the prize's presenter, A. G. Ekstrand of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, "an exceedingly important means of improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind." Yet the controversy over his award, on top of Germany's defeat, his first wife's suicide, and his developing diabetes, depressed Haber greatly.

Nevertheless, Haber continued to turn his technical acumen to patriotic ends. In 1920, to help Germany pay off the onerous war reparations that the Versailles Treaty had imposed, Haber headed a doomed attempt to recover gold from seawater. Unfortunately, he had based his project on unverified nineteenth-century mineral analyses that had grossly overestimated the quantities for gold. It turned out after several abortive sea voyages that there was simply not enough gold present in seawater to make refining profitable. However, Haber did perfect a very precise method for measuring concentrations of gold.

Haber had much greater success as continuing director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. His proven leadership ability attracted some of the best talent in the world to his laboratory in Karlsruhe and to the Institute, where in 1929 fully half of the members were foreigners from a dozen countries.

In 1919 he began the Haber Colloquium, an ongoing seminar that during the postwar years brought together the best minds in chemistry and physics, among them Niels Bohr, Peter Debye, Otto Meyerhof, and Otto Warburg. Haber's sharp wit, critical intelligence and broad knowledge of science were greatly appreciated at the seminars. When he ceased attending regularly, they became markedly less popular. Haber traveled widely to foster greater cooperation between nations. As an example, he helped establish the Japan Institute in that nation to foster shared cultural interests with other countries. From 1929 to 1933 he occupied Germany's seat on the Union Internationale de Chimie.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Kaiser Institute fell on hard times. After receiving a demand from the minister of art, science, and popular education to dismiss all Jewish workers at the institute, Haber - a Jew himself - resigned on April 30, 1933. He wrote in his letter of resignation that having always selected his collaborators on the basis of their intelligence and character, he could not conceive of having to change so successful a method.

Haber fled Germany for England, accepting the invitation of his colleague William J. Pope to work in Cambridge, where he stayed for four months. Chaim Weitzmann, a chemist who would become the first president of Israel, offered Haber the position of director in the physical chemistry department of the Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot, in what is now Israel. Despite ill health, Haber accepted and in January, 1934, after recovering from a heart attack, began the trip. Resting on the way in Basel, Switzerland, he died on January 29, 1934. His friend and colleague Willstätter gave the memorial speech at his funeral. On the first anniversary of his death, over five hundred men and women from cultural societies across Germany converged on the institute - despite Nazi attempts at intimidation - to pay homage to Haber.

Further Reading

Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 5, Scribner, 1972, pp. 620-623.

Farber, Eduard, Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry, 1901-1961, Abelard-Schuman, 1953, revised 1963, pp. 71-75.

Wasson, Tyler, editor, Nobel Prize Winners, H. W. Wilson, 1987, pp. 402-404.

Fritz Haber
Born	9 December 1868 Breslau, Germany
Died	29 January 1934 (aged 65) Basel, Switzerland
Nationality	Germany
Fields	Physical chemistry
Institutions	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology University of Karlsruhe
Alma mater	University of Heidelberg, Humboldt University of Berlin Technical University of Berlin
Doctoral advisor	Robert Bunsen
Known for	Fertilisers, Explosives, Haber process, Haber-Weiss reaction, chemical warfare
Notable awards	Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1918)

Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development for synthesizing ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. He has also been described as the "father of chemical warfare" for his work developing and deploying chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Nobel Prize 1.2 World War I 1.3 Post-war 1.4 Criticism 2 Dramatic treatment 3 References 4 Further reading 5 External links

Biography

Haber was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), to Jewish parents of one of the oldest families of the town, but Haber later converted to Christianity.^[1] His mother died during childbirth. His father was a well-known merchant in the town. From 1886 until 1891 he studied at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen, at the University of Berlin (today the Humboldt University of Berlin) in the group of A. W. Hofmann, and at the Technical College of Charlottenburg (today the Technical University of Berlin) under Carl Liebermann. He married Clara Immerwahr during 1901. Their son, Hermann was born in 1902. Before starting his own academic career he worked at his father's chemical business and in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich with Georg Lunge.

Nobel Prize

During his time at University of Karlsruhe from 1894 to 1911, he and Carl Bosch developed the Haber process, which is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under conditions of low temperature and high pressure.^[2]

In 1918 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. The Haber-Bosch process was a milestone in industrial chemistry, because it divorced the production of nitrogen products, such as fertilizer, explosives and chemical feedstocks, from natural deposits, especially sodium nitrate (caliche), of which Chile was a major (and almost unique) producer. The sudden availability of cheap nitrogenous fertilizer is credited with averting a Malthusian catastrophe,^{[citation needed]} or population crisis and led to massive unemployment in Chile.^{[citation needed]}

He was also active in the research of 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 Elektrochemistry 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).^[3][4]

World War I

Haber played a major role in the development of chemical warfare in World War I. Part of this work included the development of gas masks with absorbent filters. In addition to leading the teams developing chlorine gas and other deadly gases for use in trench warfare, Haber was on hand personally to aid in its release. Notably, future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn served as gas troops in Haber's unit.

Gas warfare in WW I was, in a sense, the war of the chemists, with Haber pitted against French Nobel laureate chemist Victor Grignard.

His wife, Clara Immerwahr, a fellow chemist, opposed his work on poison gas and committed suicide with his service weapon in their garden, possibly in response to his having personally overseen the first successful use of chlorine at the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915.^[5] She shot herself in the heart on 15 May, and died in the morning. That same morning, Haber left for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russians.^[6]

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, rare for a scientist too old to enlist in 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. During the 1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the cyanide gas formulation Zyklon B, which was used as an insecticide, especially as a fumigant in grain stores, and also later, after he left the program, in the Nazi extermination camps, killing other Jews, including, with terrible irony, many of his relatives.^[7]

Post-war

In the 1920s Haber exhaustively searched for a method to extract gold from sea water, and published a number of scientific papers on the subject. However, after years of research, he concluded that the concentration of gold dissolved in sea water was much lower than those concentrations reported by earlier researchers, and that gold extraction from sea water was uneconomic.

Haber was forced to leave Germany in 1933 because of Nazi persecution of Jews. His Nobel Prize winning work in chemistry, and subsequent contributions to Germany's war efforts in the form of chemical fertilizers, explosives and poison munitions, were not enough to prevent vilification of his heritage by the Nazi regime. He moved to Cambridge, England, for a few months. Haber was offered by Chaim Weizmann the position of director at the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, in Mandate Palestine, and accept it. He started his voyage to what is today Israel in January 1934, after recovering from a heart attack. However, his ill health overpowered him and in January 29, 1934, at the age of 65, he died of heart failure in a Basel hotel, where he was resting on his way to the Middle East.^[8]He was cremated and his ashes, together with Clara's ashes, were buried in Basel's Hornli Cemetery. ^[9] He bequeathed his extensive private library to the Sieff Institute.

Haber's immediate family also left Germany. His second wife, Charlotte, with their two children, settled in England. Haber's son, Hermann, from his first marriage emigrated to the United States during World War II. He committed suicide in 1946. Members of Haber's extended family died in concentration camps. One of his children, Ludwig ("Lutz") Fritz Haber (1921-2004), became an eminent historian of chemical warfare in World War I, and published a book called The Poisonous Cloud (1986).^[10]

Criticism

Haber received much criticism for his involvement in the development of chemical weapons in pre-World War II Germany both by contemporaries and by modern-day scientists.^[11]

Dramatic treatment

A fictional description of Haber's life, and in particular his longtime 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. This is the description of the first^[12] from the Diversity Website:

“

Bread from the Air, Gold from the Sea as another chemical story (R4, 1415, 16 Feb 01). Fritz Haber found a way of making nitrogen compounds from the air. They have two main uses: fertilizers and explosives. His process enabled Germany to produce vast quantities of armaments. (The second part of the title refers to a process for obtaining gold from sea water. It worked, but didn't pay.) There can be few figures with a more interesting life than Haber, from a biographer's point of view. He made German agriculture independent of Chilean saltpetre during the Great War. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, yet there were moves to strip him of the award because of his work on gas warfare. He pointed out, rightly, that most of Nobel's money had come from armaments and the pursuit of war. After Hitler's rise to power, the government forced Haber to resign from his professorship and research jobs because he was Jewish.

”

The second was entitled "The Greater Good" and was first broadcast on 23 October 2008.^[13] It was directed by Celia de Wolff and written by Justin Hopper, and starred Anton Lesser as Haber. It explored his work on gas warfare during the First World War 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 entitled "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.^[14][15]

In November 2008 Haber was again played by Anton Lesser in Einstein and Eddington.^[16]

References

1. ^ http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1918/haber-bio.html Nobel biography of Fritz Haber
2. ^ "Original Patent for Synthesis of Ammonia". European Patent Office. http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=DE&NR=235421&KC=&FT=E. 
3. ^ "...MDMA was actually first synthesized by Fritz Haber in 1892...". Ask Erowid. http://www.erowid.org/ask/ask.php?ID=3104. 
4. ^ Benzenhöfer, U. and Passie, T. (2006): Zur Frühgeschichte von Ecstasy. In: Der Nervenarzt. Bd. 77, S. 95-99. PMID 16397805 PDF
5. ^ Hobbes, Nicholas (2003). Essential Militaria. Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1843542292. 
6. ^ Huxtable, R. J. (2002). "Reflections: Fritz Haber and the ambiguity of ethics". Procedings Western Pharmacology Soc 45: 1–3. http://www.westernpharmsoc.org/wpsjournal/Vol45/PWPS%202002%20PDF/Pages%201-3%20PWPS%202002%20Huxtable%20Haber.pdf. Retrieved 2009-10-11. 
7. ^ M. Szöllösi-Janze (2001). "Pesticides and war: the case of Fritz Haber". European Review 9: 97–108. doi:10.1017/S1062798701000096. 
8. ^ [1]
9. ^ A photograph of their gravestone in Hornli Cemetery, Basel can be found in the book written by Stolzenberg.
10. ^ "Lutz F. Haber (1921–2004)". University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mainzv/HIST/awards/Dexter%20Papers/HaberDexterBioJJB.pdf. 
11. ^ Between Genius and Genocide: The Tragedy of Fritz Haber, Father of Chemical Warfare by Daniel Charles
12. ^ "Bread from the Air, Gold from the Sea". Archives of Anthony Phillips (who composed the music). http://www.anthonyphillips.co.uk/media/bfta.htm. 
13. ^ "Afternoon Play, The Greater Good". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f06bw. 
14. ^ "Haber (2008)". The Internet Movie Database. 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1258199/. Retrieved 2008-09-18. 
15. ^ Trailer for Haber short film
16. ^ "Einstein and Eddington (2008) (TV)". The Internet Movie Database. 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995036/. Retrieved 2008-09-18. 

Further reading

• Daniel Charles, Master mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (New York: Ecco, 2005), ISBN 0-06-056272-2.
• Dietrich Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew: A Biography (Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2005), ISBN 0-941901-24-6.
• Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (2001) ISBN 0-262-19449-X
• Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (2008) ISBN 978-0-307-35178-4.

External links

• Nobel e-Museum - Biography of Fritz Haber
• HABER - A Biographical Film about Fritz Haber
• Photographs of Fritz Haber's life
• A short biography of Fritz Haber, by Bretislav Friedrich
• Encyclopedia Britannica: Nobel Prizes - Fritz Haber
• "The Synthesis of Ammonia from its Elements", Nobel Lecture, 2 June 1920

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Chemistry Jacobus van 't Hoff (1901) · Emil Fischer (1902) · Svante Arrhenius (1903) · William Ramsay (1904) · Adolf von Baeyer (1905) · Henri Moissan (1906) · Eduard Buchner (1907) · Ernest Rutherford (1908) · Wilhelm Ostwald (1909) · Otto Wallach (1910) · Marie Curie (1911) · Victor Grignard / Paul Sabatier (1912) · Alfred Werner (1913) · Theodore Richards (1914) · Richard Willstätter (1915) · Fritz Haber (1918) · Walther Nernst (1920) · Frederick Soddy (1921) · Francis Aston (1922) · Fritz Pregl (1923) · Richard Zsigmondy (1925) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

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