The Man Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions (Clean Version)

- The 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is probably the most important Nobel Prize ever awarded. It was awarded to German scientist Fritz Haber for solving one of the biggest problems humanity has ever faced. His invention is directly responsible for the lives of 4 billion people today. But when he received the award from him, many of his classmates refused to attend. Two other Nobel laureates rejected his awards in protest and the New York Times wrote a scathing article about him. He is both one of the most shocking and tragic scientists of all time. (dramatic orchestral music) Perhaps more than any other person, he has shaped the world we live in today. (dramatic orchestral music) (tense music) If you are a US citizen and you find an island with a lot of bird poop, then you can claim that island for the United States and the US will back you up.

The president is authorized to send the Navy and Army to defend the newly discovered excrement-covered island. Currently there are 10 American islands that were claimed in this way. And although the law that made it possible was passed in 1856, it remains in force to this day. So why did people want poop-covered islands so much? (birds singing) ("The Blue Danube") There are a few dozen islands off the coast of Peru where

millions

of seabirds gather to mate and the waters near the island are full of fish, and these

millions

of birds gather They eat the fish, and then they poop, a lot. ("The Blue Danube") Since the region is hot and dry, this excrement solidifies and accumulates over millennia.

There are cliffs of bird droppings 30 meters or a hundred feet high. ("The Blue Danube") And technically bird poop is called guano, and in the mid-19th century, buying and selling bird guano was big business. The price rose to $76 per pound, meaning four pounds of guano could be exchanged for one pound of gold. So why was there such a big market for bird droppings? Well, to answer that we have to look inside the human body. By weight, the majority of our bodies are composed of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen. But the fourth most common element is nitrogen. Nitrogen is part of the amino acids that make up proteins.

It is part of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying compound in red blood cells and is a central component of DNA and RNA. Nitrogen is essential for all life on earth. We get our nitrogen by eating plants or animals that have eaten plants, and plants get their nitrogen from the soil. The problem is that if you till the same soil year after year, you harvest the nitrogen and eventually there isn't enough nitrogen for healthy plants to grow. They cannot produce enough chlorophyll to carry out photosynthesis, which slows their growth. Their leaves turn yellow and are more susceptible to pests and diseases.

Fundamentally, for farmers, nitrogen deficiency means lower yields. The way to fix this is to add nitrogen back to the soil, which is where the bird guano comes in. (rhythmic music) Guano contains up to 20% nitrogen. Hundreds of years ago, Incan farmers realized that adding guano to their soil made crops grow larger. This is what allowed them to grow food in previously uncultivable places and expand their empire. South America's rich deposits of bird droppings did not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. In 1865, Spain went to war against its former colonies of Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia for control of their guano-laden islands.

But the world's appetite for nitrogen was such that by 1872 guano was running out and Peru banned new exports. The world would need another way to get its nitrogen fix. (tense music) This was a crisis. William Crooks, a British chemist, made a terrible prophecy in 1898. With the world's population growing and nitrogen supplies dwindling, he said, "We are in mortal danger of not having enough to eat." In less than 30 years, he claimed, people around the world will starve, but he also proposed a solution. "It is the chemist who must come to the rescue. It is through the laboratory that hunger can finally become abundance." Because here's the thing: Nitrogen isn't rare, it's common. 78% of the air is nitrogen, but it is in a form that plants and animals cannot use.

Two nitrogen atoms have a triple bond. This bond is one of the strongest in nature. The way to measure the strength of a chemical bond is by the amount of energy needed to break it. So to separate two chlorine atoms, for example, it would take 2 1/2 electron volts. To separate two carbons, 3.8 eV is needed. Two oxygens, 5.2 eV. But breaking two nitrogen atoms requires 9.8 electron volts, a huge amount of energy. (noisy models) I just want to chime in to say that the molecular models in this video were actually invented by me. These are Snatoms, a product I started about eight years ago in which all the atoms were magnetically bonded together.

Then, you can feel the attraction between the atoms and hear the energy released (the clicks of the atoms) when the bonds form. The resulting molecules look and behave more like real molecules and are faster and easier to form and break down. Snatoms are for sale on Amazon and snatoms.com. So, I'll put some links in the description. Now, this video is a new post. The original upload got over 14 million views and suddenly it was age-restricted and demonetized. But I think it's a really good video, so we'll repost it with the offending section removed. It's a reminder that you can't always count on YouTube monetization.

So if you want to support these videos, consider purchasing Snatoms if you want some or supporting us on Patreon. And now let's split the nitrogen molecules again. (models clattering) (thunder) There are two processes that do this naturally. The rays release so much energy that they split in two to form individual nitrogen atoms. They then react quickly to form nitrogen oxides and these molecules remain in the atmosphere until they react with water droplets in the clouds and fall to the ground as rain. There are also some types of bacteria living in the soil that can break the N2 bond using an enormous amount of energy to do so, making nitrogen available to plants.

But bacteria only replenish nitrogen slowly, and there aren't enough rays to produce nitrogen compounds at scale. Then the chemists tried it. In 1811, Georg Hildebrandt mixed nitrogen and hydrogen in a sealed flask in an attempt to produce ammonia, one of the nitrogen-containing molecules found in guano. When that didn't work, he submerged the flask 300 meters underwater to increase the pressure and that didn't work either, but he was on the right track. Over the next hundred years, increasingly sophisticated

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s of these experiments were carried out. They all failed. Thus, when Fritz Haber became interested in this problem in 1904, he joined a long list of failed chemists.

He was 36 years old and worked as a low-level academic at the University of Karlsruhe. He was also a first-time father to a two-year-old boy named Herman and his wife, Clara, who was one of the first women to earn a doctorate in chemistry. Driven by pride and competition with another scientist, Haber devoted five years to the problem. His idea was to combine nitrogen and hydrogen not only at high pressure, but also at high temperature and in the presence of a catalyst, something that reduces the amount of energy needed to split the diatomic nitrogen. For this it was necessary to invent new experimental devices.

Haber worked tirelessly on this project building equipment that could tolerate increasingly higher temperatures and pressures. He was lucky too. At that time he worked as a technical consultant for a light bulb manufacturer. So, there he had access to a lot of really hard to find materials. Like the element osmium. Osmium is rare. In his time, only about 100 kilograms of refined metal existed, but the company he worked for was experimenting with using it for the filaments of its light bulbs. So, they had most of the world's supply. Haber suspected it might be the perfect catalyst, so he took a sample to his lab.

And there, in the third week of March 1909, Haber placed his osmium foil in the pressure chamber and then pressurized and heated the nitrogen and hydrogen to 200 atmospheres and 500 degrees Celsius. Under these conditions, the triple bonds were broken and the nitrogen reacted with the hydrogen. Of the total gas mixture, 6% became ammonia. When the gas cooled, a milliliter of ammonia dripped from the end of a narrow tube into a beaker. Haber, elated, ran from one laboratory to another shouting: "Come down. There's ammonia." Germany's largest chemical company, BASF, commercialized Haber's process. Within four years they opened a factory in Oppau that produced five tons of ammonia a day. ("Symphony No. 9 in D minor") People talked about making bread with air. ("Symphony No. 9 in D Minor") With the fertilizer from this industrial process on the same plot of land, farmers were able to grow four times as much food and as a result, the land's population quadrupled.

It is very likely that you owe your life to Haber's invention. The Earth today supports 4 billion more people than it could without nitrogen fertilizers. In fact, about 50% of the nitrogen atoms in the body come from the Haber process. (whisper of wheat) The invention made Fritz Haber a rich man. He earned a promotion and became founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin. He also befriended some of the greatest scientists of his time, including Max Planck, Max Born, and Albert Einstein. After Einstein separated from his first wife in 1914, he spent the night at Haber's house.

But if Haber was so well regarded, why did his colleagues reject him when he won the Nobel Prize? Well, it all comes down to what happened in World War I. When war broke out, Haber volunteered for military service. Unlike the pacifist Einstein who denounced the war, Haber was a patriot. He wanted to use his experience to help his country. Just a few months into the war, the German army was already running out of gunpowder and explosives. Ammonium nitrate, in addition to being an excellent fertilizer, is also an explosive. Just look at what happened in Beirut in August 2020. (explosion booming) (crowd screaming) A warehouse containing almost 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire.

And in the extreme heat, the fertilizer detonated. The explosion, which could be heard hundreds of miles away,

killed

at least 217 people and injured thousands more. Seismometers recorded an artificial earthquake measuring 3.3 on the Richter scale. This is just one of many explosions related to fertilizers. The Oppau plant, where the Haber process was first put into practice, would also explode in 1921. And the reason is nitrogen. We have already seen that it takes an enormous amount of energy to break the triple bond in nitrogen. But the other side of that coin is that when two nitrogen atoms come together and form that bond (the atoms click) an enormous amount of energy is released.

Explosions of gunpowder, TNT, nitroglycerin, and ammonium nitrate form diatomic nitrogen gas as a product. And the formation of that triple bond is where these chemicals obtain much of their explosive energy. Haber pushed to convert factories that used the process to produce ammonia as fertilizer and instead create nitrate for explosives. His superiors believed such a con

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was impossible, but Haber persisted and soon his chemistry was at the heart of the German war machine. From bread falling from the air to bombs falling from the air. (Guns burst) But Haber thought chemistry could make an even greater contribution to warfare.

In December 1914 he witnessed a chemical weapons test. He was not impressed. Haber believed he could do better. He set out to make a gas that was deadly in low concentrations and heavier than air so that it could sink into enemy trenches. Projectiles carrying chemical weapons were banned, at least in theory, by the Hague Convention of 1899. But in practice, after the start of the war, Germany, France and Great Britain experimented with chemical weapons. Haber converted his wing of the institute into a chemical weapons laboratory and, after only a few months of work, focused on chlorine gas. One employee, Otto Hahn, expressed his discomfort with the new weapon.

Haber told him: "If the war could be ended more quickly in this way, countless human lives would be

saved

." (somber music) At 6:00 p.m. On April 22, with the wind blowing toward the Allied trenches, German troops released 168 tons of chlorine from more than 5,000 gas cylinders. The wall of gas advanced across the battlefield. Since chlorine gas is two and a half times heavier than air, it sank into the trenches of Allied soldiers.Any soldier who inhaled a lung full of gas suffered a terrible death. Chlorine irritates the mucosal lining of the lungs so violently that they fill with fluid.

The soldiers actually drowned on dry land. (somber music) More than 5,000 Allied soldiers died this way in the first attack. (somber music) Haber was promoted to the rank of captain. Haber spent the rest of the war directing his institute researching chemical weapons, gas masks and pesticides. In 1917, the institute employed 1,500 people, including 150 scientists. It was like a mini Manhattan project but for chemical weapons. In total, 100,000 soldiers died from chemical weapons in World War I. When Germany surrendered, Haber was crushed. All the money he made from his ammonia patent was lost due to hyperinflation. In an attempt to pay off Germany's crippling war debt, he attempted to distill gold from seawater, but the project was futile.

In 1933, the Nazis came to power and passed a law that all Jewish civil servants, including scientists, were to be fired from their jobs. Haber was Jewish but never practiced religion. In any case, his military service exempted him from the law, but he resigned his position as director in solidarity with all the Jewish scientists working at the institute. (thoughtful music) The following year, in a hotel room in Basel, Switzerland, he died of heart failure. Immediately after World War I, The Haber Institute developed a cyanide-based insecticide. It had a barely detectable odor, so they mixed it with a smelly chemical to alert people to the danger.

The resulting gas was called Zyklon B. A decade after Haber's death, the Nazis asked chemists to remove the foul-smelling component and this form of Zyklon B, the chemical developed at the Haber Institute, was used to perpetrate the Holocaust. . (slow tempo music) Thinking about this story, it would be easy to paint Haber as a villain or a hero for inventing the process used to feed half the world. But another approach is to consider it irrelevant to the larger story because someone else would have discovered a way to process nitrogen from the air and other scientists were developing chemical weapons.

In recent centuries, science and technology have greatly improved our lives, but they have also given us ever greater ways to destroy ourselves. I think it would be great to believe that we could ask scientists to only work on problems that are good for humanity. But the reality is that every bit of information is a potential double-edged sword. You don't know the outcome of your research or how it might be used later. Ammonium nitrate is both a fertilizer and an explosive. So the real question is how do we continue to increase our knowledge and control of the natural world without destroying ourselves and everything else on this planet in the process?