Haber, Fritz (1868-1934)

German chemist whose conversion of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia opened the way for the synthetic fertilizer industry. His study of the combustion of hydrocarbons led to the commercial ‘cracking’ or fractional distillation of natural oil (petroleum) into its components (for example, diesel fuel, petrol, and paraffin). In electrochemistry, he was the first to demonstrate that oxidation and reduction take place at the electrodes; from this he developed a general electrochemical theory. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918 for his work on the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Haber was asked to devise a method of producing nitric acid for making high explosives. Later he became one of the principals in the German chemical warfare effort, devising weapons and gas masks, which led to protests against his Nobel Prize in 1918.

Haber was born in Bresslau, Silesia (now Wrocław, Poland), and educated at Berlin, Heidelberg, and the Berlin Technische Hochschule. He was professor at Karlsruhe 1906-11, and then was made director of the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin. When Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, Haber sought exile in Britain, where he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge.

After World War I, Haber set himself the task of extracting gold from sea water to help to pay off the reparations demanded from Germany by the Allies. Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius had calculated that the sea contains 8,000 million tonnes of gold. The project got as far as the fitting-out of a ship and the commencement of the extraction process, but the yields were too low and the project was abandoned in 1928.