Product Description

A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the discovery that changed billions of lives—including your own.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world’s scientists to find a solution.
This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives. Their invention continues to feed us today; without it, more than two billion people would starve.

But their epochal triumph came at a price we are still paying. The Haber-Bosch process was also used to make the gunpowder and high explosives that killed millions during the two world wars. Both men were vilified during their lives; both, disillusioned and disgraced, died tragically. Today we face the other un­intended consequences of their discovery—massive nitrogen pollution and a growing pandemic of obesity.

The Alchemy of Air is the extraordinary, previously untold story of two master scientists who saved the world only to lose everything and of the unforseen results of a discovery that continues to shape our lives in the most fundamental and dramatic of ways.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #319194 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-09
• Released on: 2008-09-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307351784
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Fixed nitrogen (which is immediately usable to plants) is essential in agriculture. Its rarity, as science writer Hager (The Demon Under the Microscope) shows, dramatically shaped the world and its politics. But by 1905, as Hager details, German chemist Fritz Haber discovered a process for transforming abundant air-borne nitrogen into ammonia, and Carl Bosch's ingenious engineering scaled Haber's benchtop chemistry into industrial processes to make fertilizer. But Hager's story is not only one of triumph, of how Haber and Bosch invented a way to turn air into bread, earning a Nobel Prize and saving millions from starvation. This is also a story of irony and tragedy. First, life-saving nitrogen is also the main ingredient in explosives, and Hager cogently summarizes the Haber-Bosch process's critical role in both world wars. In addition, Hager illustrates Haber's extreme German patriotism and desperate wish to assimilate; shattered by the rise of Hitler, he became an outcast, abandoned even by his onetime colleague Bosch. It's unfortunate that Hager ends his fine book with only a brief look at the deleterious role of nitrogen on the environment. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Guy Gugliotta Somehow fertilizer seems an unlikely subject for a Faustian tale about pride, vanity and ambition. Yet here it is: Chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch won Nobel Prizes for their contributions to humanity as young men and reached the pinnacle of German science, only to be brought low by their own, very human failings. Haber and Bosch invented industrially made fertilizer during the first decade of the 20th century, developing a method of synthesizing and mass-producing ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen, hence the title of Thomas Hager's book, The Alchemy of Air. The need for such a process was urgent. Agricultural crops required nitrogen, but by the late 19th century the parched flatlands of Chile's Atacama Desert were the world's only major source of nitrates, and supplies were running out. With most arable land already cultivated and populations on the rise, a Malthusian nightmare loomed. Haber, a chemist living in Karlsruhe, invented a method of blending hydrogen and nitrogen in a high-pressure, high-temperature chamber using a metal catalyst. He developed a tabletop model and sold the ammonia production process to the German dye works Badish Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik, known today as BASF, one of the world's leading chemical companies. Bosch, a BASF chemist, was given the task of scaling up Haber's idea. He succeeded spectacularly, creating immense manufacturing complexes and eventually becoming managing director of BASF and, subsequently, chairman of IG Farben, the conglomerate he helped create. The Haber-Bosch process is still the leading method of making synthetic fertilizer, and Bosch is venerated in some circles as the father of industrial chemistry. Hager, a science writer who previously wrote a biography of Linus Pauling and a book about the discovery of the earliest antibiotics, tells the story of fertilizer well. But it takes up only half the book. The rest focuses on the personalities of Haber and Bosch, and on how their strengths ultimately became fatal weaknesses. Once he made his initial discovery, Haber, a prodigiously gifted but insecure young chemist, rose to the front rank of the world's scientists as a director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Genius played a role, as did guile. But Haber also forged ahead by consciously forswearing his Jewish heritage to embrace German nationalism. Albert Einstein, a lifelong friend, at first gently mocked Haber for his willingness to please, then felt sorry for him as they grew older. Bosch, meanwhile, began as an earnest, honest young researcher debunking the claims of lesser scientists. He ended up as a multinational industrial tycoon whose obsession with scoring commercial successes led him to build IG Farben into one of the largest companies in the world. But when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, things changed. Haber suddenly understood that he would always be Jewish and that the terrible bargains he had made would bring him nothing but contempt and ostracism. Bosch, heartsick at the prospect of firing large numbers of his Jewish employees in a Nazi purge, sought an exception in a personal interview with Hitler, only to endure an anti-Semitic tirade. He realized that the immense industrial enterprise to which he had dedicated his life had been placed at the service of a monster. Yet neither man is to be pitied, for both made their choices freely. Inventing fertilizer may have helped mankind, but it also launched their careers, and both took advantage. At the beginning of World War I, Bosch volunteered to convert his entire operation to the manufacture of explosives, fertilizer's chemical first cousin. The government subsidized the biggest munitions plant in the world and built it partly with slave labor. Haber, also eager to please, joined the war ministry, donned a captain's uniform, developed a method of blanketing enemy trenches with poisonous chlorine gas and oversaw its first successful demonstration at Ypres in 1915. Structurally, The Alchemy of Air is a series of narrative set pieces linking Haber and Bosch to tumultuous events. First comes a brief history of fertilizer, with episodes in the Atacama and the guano islands off Peru, where Chinese coolies worked in horrendous conditions; it's a harsh but riveting story little known in the United States. Then Hager describes the development of the Haber-Bosch synthesis, a worthy addition to the growing genre of histories about scientific processes. Finally, the author presents a cautionary tale about the misuse of science in modern times: how two brilliant innovators helped create the explosives, poison gas and synthetic fuels that enabled despots in a small nation to wage two catastrophic wars. The Alchemy of Air is a quick, easy read, aimed at a general -- i.e., impatient -- audience. This is unfortunate. Haber and Bosch are fascinating if troubled personalities, brought by Hager compellingly to life. Though Haber and his contradictions have inspired a number of biographies and even a play, Bosch (whose collections of 25,000 minerals and 4 million insects ended up in the Smithsonian) is almost unknown. With these two stars, plus Imperial Germany and the rise of Nazism as a stage and cameos by Einstein, Max Planck and other giants of German science and industry, there is material here for twice as big a book. One wishes that Hager had kept writing.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
Named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Kirkus Reviews

"Make[s] the scientific process as suspenseful as a good whodunit."
—Oregonian

"[A] smooth, well-researched book that reads like a fast-paced novel."
—News & Observer (Raleigh)

"This scientific adventure spans two world wars and every cell in your body."
—Discover magazine

"Haber and Bosch are fascinating if troubled personalities, brought by Hager compellingly to life."
—Washington Post Book World

“[A] gripping account of the partnership between two Nobel Prize winners whose efforts to save the world had tragic consequences we’re still sifting through today.”
—Plenty magazine

“You will certainly find [Hager’s] story of [Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch] and their discover to be enlightening and entertaining….I know of few other books that provide the general reader with a better portrait of chemistry as the most useful of sciences, and I intend to recommend it to scientists and non-scientists alike.”
—The Journal of Chemical Education

“Many discoveries and inventions are touted as history-changing. But as Thomas Hager admirably proves in his new book, The Alchemy of Air, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch not only changed history, they made much of recent human history possible. As Hager solemnly notes in his introduction, ‘the discovery described in this book is keeping alive nearly half the people on earth.’ ….As with almost all technological advancement, however, there is a downside. The synthetic Haber-Bosch nitrogen, which now makes up about half the nitrogen in every human body, also fueled the weapons of the world wars and created a nitrogen-rich environment that is having a huge impact on Earth, from lush vegetative growth to dead zones ...

Customer Reviews

Bosch, Haber and Fixation of Nitrogen
The author has written a well researched and readable account of the
early 20th century work of Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber, who set in place
modern nitrogen fixation methods. The author has done a good job of simplifying the technical details for the average reader.
As an academic chemist, I feel compelled to quibble a little with some of the details, none of which should bother most readers.
The author states(chapter 12) that nitric acid could not be made from ammonia, but could be made from cyanamide( this is in 1914). He goes on to say that Bosch built a factory to produce sodium nitrate from ammonia. This is confusing on several grounds. The presently used production of nitric acid proceeds through the catalytic oxidation of ammonia. The book mentions Bosch having a catalyst.Synthetic sodium nitrate would be produced from nitric acid. As for cyanamide, it is a source of ammonia-
therefore it is hard to understand how nitric acid could be prepared from
cyanamide, but not from ammonia, as the author suggests.
The book has a very extensive bibliography, and perhaps I can solve all these questions by recourse to the original sources. None of this makes much difference for the main points of the book.
I have read quite a bit on this general area, and this is one of the best books I have found on Haber and Bosch, and I found it interesting and provocative.
I found one puzzling entry in the bibliography which may have been included in error : a biography of Whistler, which as far as I can tell is not referenced anywhere else in the book.

A historical account of nitrogen chemistry
The story of nitrogen is that although we have plenty of it in the atomosphere, it exists in a tripled bonded state which is not biologically useful. Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber take a new invention to a higher level to change all of this by feeding a (predicted) starving world with the production of ammonia, and accordingly, synthetic fertilizer. Needless to say, the idea of being wealthy did enter the minds of the inventors as well. But as history has its hand in most everyones' lives, so it dealt some special cards to these otherwise high achievers of the 1930 or so era. Before they could really start on their mission to save man, the Nazi boss (Hitler) needs a war factory to create explosives, which, by the way, also requires this mercurial supply of useful nitrogen so friendly to agriculture. The story intrigues one by using a most ultimate delima. The one device designed to save mankind, will now make devices than kill him. The Haber-Bosch device and its "friendly" nitrogen may have some rather strange and unforeseen consequences for our earth's environment as well. The author, Thomas Hager, formulates a breathless tale of intrigue by omitting some of the more technical aspects of nitrogen chemistry, and instead insisting on story details we need to incorportate into modern times. guyairey

Couldn't put it down
This is a fabulous true tale exceptionally well told by Thomas Hager. History changing events in Latin America and Europe are made palpable, interesting, and are told in a way that makes you care very intensely about the protagonists involved. Especially fascinating is the telling of the history of contesting in Peru and Chile over the raw materials for nitrogen fertilizer. Get this book now and I guarantee you won't put it down and will learn much about world history and how it could have been quite different. I can't say enough good things. Just get the book now. Gee, it almost sounds like I know the author, or stand to gain somehow. I don't and just want to share this book with the world.

John Lavender