Fritz Haber

File:Fritz Haber.png

Fritz Haber in 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 of synthetic ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives. He is also credited as the "father of chemical warfare" for his work developing and deploying chlorine and other poison gases during World War I; this role is thought to have provoked his wife to commit suicide.

Despite his contributions to the German war effort, Haber was forced to emigrate from Germany in 1933 by the Nazis because of his Jewish background; many of his relatives were killed by the Nazis in concentration camps, gassed by Zyklon B. He died in the process of emigration.

Biography

He was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) to Siegfried and Paula Haber. His mother died in childbirth. His father was a prominent merchant in the town. From 1886 until 1891 he studied at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen, at the 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 in 1901. 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 in Karlsruhe from 1894 until 1911, he and Carl Bosch developed the Haber process, which is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under conditions of high temperature and high pressure.

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 producer. The sudden availability of cheap nitrogenous fertilizer is credited with averting a Malthusian catastrophe, or population crisis.

He was also active in the research of combustion reactions, the separation of gold from sea water, adsorption effects, and electrochemistry. A large part of his work from 1911 to 1933 was done at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem.

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.

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

His wife opposed his work on poison gas and committed suicide with his service weapon at a dinner party in tribute to his having personally overseen the first successful use of chlorine at the Second Battle of Ypres. She shot herself in the heart, and died in the morning. That same morning, Haber left for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russians.

Haber was a patriotic German who was proud of his service in World War I, for which he was decorated. He was even given the rank of Captain by the Kaiser, a rare thing 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. In 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 in the Nazi extermination camps.

Post-War

Though he had converted from Judaism in an effort to become fully accepted, he was forced to emigrate from Germany by the Nazis in 1933 on account of his being Jewish in their eyes. He struggled to cope with the new reality that his enormous contributions to German industry were not enough to prevent his vilification by the Nazi regime. He moved to Cambridge, England, for a few months, and considered a position in Rehovot, Palestine British Mandate (now Israel), but never settled anywhere permanently. He died of heart failure, aged 65, in a hotel in Basel, on his way to a convalescent retreat in Switzerland.

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, gassed by Zyklon B.

Dramatic treatment

A fictional portrait of Haber's life, and in particular his longtime relationship with Albert Einstein, appears in Vern Thiessen's 2003 play, Einstein's Gift. Thiessen portrays Haber as a tragic figure who strives unsuccessfully throughout his life to evade both his Jewish background and the moral implications of his scientific contributions.

See also

• Ammonia
• Nazism
• World War I

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• 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

External links

• Nobel e-Museum - Biography of Fritz Haber
• Photographs of Fritz Haber's life
• A short biography of Fritz Haber, by Bretislav Friedrich
• Biographical Film about Fritz Haber

Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Laureates (1901-1925)

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