Welcome to: The Talking President
It's a hard story to accept...
About half of the population of the planet today is fed by one chemist from hell.
He invented the black technology that supports humans more than 100 years ago.
But when he won the Nobel Prize for it, no scientist was willing to share the stage with him and refused to shake his hand.
It is also said that he is a poisoner from hell.
So, what exactly did this chemist do?
Today, we're going to talk about this story.
Doomsday prophecy
Back in 1798, an anonymous paper of more than 150 pages was published at Jesus College at Cambridge University.
The paper accurately predicts that the world's population will grow exponentially, but the food supply will grow linearly, which will inevitably lead to food production not keeping up with population growth.
So, if the global population is not controlled, then the end will surely begin with famine.
The paper was logically rigorous and mathematically sufficient, and many scientists gasped after reading the paper, wondering which professor's thesis it or was it really enlightenment from the gods?
Three years later, experts learned that the author of this paper turned out to be the great mathematician Malthus, whose paper was later called "Population Theory", which is still a must-read classic of economics.
The prophecy in the paper is called the Malthusian catastrophe.
But we know that Malthus's prophecy is almost 300 years old, and there seems to be no apocalyptic famine, isn't this a fallacy?
In fact, it is not that the prediction is inaccurate, but that a chemist came out to save the scene.
Sky City
In 1804, a gray-haired German naturalist came to the sky city of the Inca Empire.
His name was Alexander von Humboldt.
He was stunned by the megalithic miracle in front of him, how did the Incas carry these megaliths?
Von Humboldt believed that behind these megaliths was actually a demographic miracle of another Inca Empire.
As long as the population is large enough, it is theoretically possible to build this sky city through division of labor.
But how many people does this need?
Preliminary calculations led him to estimate that the Inca Empire might have had a population of 8 million.
That's an exaggeration, because there is simply not enough arable land to feed 8 million people.
Von Humboldt has been thinking about how the ancient Incas fed a population of 8 million with these limited terraces in front of them.
Corn, potatoes, these amazing South American plants have been used by Europeans, but no matter how you calculate it, these terraces cannot produce enough food.
From the plateau to the jungle to the coast, von Humboldt spent two years here, and one day he found the secret of the Inca Empire on an island.
The indigenous people of the island said that before the arrival of you Westerners, the officials of the Inca Empire had to transport many, many soils from here every year, and the soil on the island was blessed by the gods, and scattered them on the terraces of the sky city, and the crops were multiplied.
Von Humboldt brought the soil back to Germany, but more than 20 years later, no one has been able to crack the secrets of the soil.
Finally one day in 1830, a student of von Humboldt caught his eye, this guy named von Liebig was very good at chemical analysis, why not let him try it?
So the guy began to analyze the experiment, and two years later, he said, the code to make the crops multiplied was the nitrogen in these soils.
These soils are not so much their dirt as they are guano, which is actually a material formed by the deposition of guano over hundreds of millions of years, with a nitrogen content of up to 20%.
The young man's paper was groundbreaking, and the great powers of Britain, France, and Spain reacted immediately, and all of them ran to South America to enclosure.
Then, guano from South America became the most sought-after strategic material in the world at that time.
For example, the United States, which came to the fore, even passed a "guano island law" in 1856, saying that if you are a citizen of the United States, then no matter where you find an unclaimed guano island anywhere on the earth, or it is not under the jurisdiction of any other government, you can swear sovereignty on behalf of the United States, and the American military will immediately deploy to provide you with all-round protection.
This decree is still in force today.
Today, the United States occupies the following 22 famous islands through this decree, including not only strategic places such as Midway and Guam, but also beautiful islands such as American Samoa, rich in strong men, and for more urban legends on these islands, you can refer to the Pacific series of stories on our member channel.
In short, guano is a salvation for mankind and allows us to temporarily jump out of the Malthusian trap.
However, the guano in the world is, after all, a spoonful less to dig up.
What can I do when I finish digging?
Sure enough, in 1898, another chemist named Sir William Crookes again predicted that the world's guano would be exhausted in 10 years, and calculations showed that the apocalyptic famine would arrive on time in 1930.
But at the same time, the chemist also predicted that a future savior would come, who would bring to mankind a magic that would make bread from the air.
3 years later...
Three years later (1892), a 23-year-old doctor of chemistry graduated from college and returned to his father's dye factory.
His name is Fritz Haber, a super scholar and a top rich second generation.
Like a prophet, he told his father categorically that the future belongs to the era of synthetic chemistry, and dad you are still using natural dyes?
Listen to me, quickly change the factory into a synthetic dye line, absolutely right.
Obviously, Dad directly rejected Haber's suggestion.
As a result, a few days later, Haber ran again and said, Dad, you must stock up on goods, stock up on a large amount of calcium hypochlorite, this is currently the only effective cholera drug, seeing that the cholera epidemic is coming, don't you want to rely on this opportunity to make a lot of money?
Dad is such a son, no matter what, the factory will also be handed over to him in the future, although it is not reliable, but I have to bite the bullet and let him try it.
As a result, where do you know, a few days later, the dad was directly dumbfounded, the warehouse was full of half German calcium hypochlorite, do you kid really have no concept of money?
Sure enough, a few weeks later, Germany extinguished the cholera epidemic with isolation measures, and the calcium hypochlorite in those warehouses was inherently unstable and had a short shelf life, and could only watch them all rot.
From then on, Dad drove Haber back to the university and completely cut off the idea of training him to take over...
And what about this Haber who was driven away by his daddy?
No one knew that he was the prophesied savior...
1903 Badenburg, Germany
In the blink of an eye, 10 years have passed, and the 23-year-old Harper has become an academic star in his 30s, and he has become popular in the chemistry world.
On this day, a chemical plant manager in Austria wrote to say, Dr. Ha, our chemical products in the factory are so simple that the exciting ammonia, which is produced at a high temperature of 1000 ° C, we doubt, will they come from nitrogen in the air? Please Dr. Ha must take a look.
Haber was interested when he saw it, this is the chemical plant completed artificial nitrogen fixation.
And artificial nitrogen fixation, is this the savior magic predicted by Crooks back then?
In fact, chemists have long discovered that the nitrogen element in bird droppings is not mysterious, it is almost one of the most accessible elements on Earth, because 78% of the air is nitrogen.
But at the same time, it is also one of the most difficult elements on Earth to obtain, because two nitrogen are bound by three chemical bonds, and plants cannot disassemble these three chemical bonds, so they cannot directly use nitrogen.
Natural inoculation, there are only two sources of nitrogen that can be used by plants, the first is lightning, only super energy of the level of lightning can break the three chemical bonds in the middle of the nitrogen, so that the traveling nitrogen reacts with oxygen and hydrogen in the air to become amino and nitro substances, so that it can be used by plants.
The second source is bacteria, some bacteria can break down nitrogen into organic nitrogen that can be used by plants, they generally symbiosis in the roots of plants, provide nitrogen fertilizer for plants, and plants also provide them with nutrients.
Of course, guano is the third source later discovered, but it is also the product of bacterial decomposition.
Therefore, in the view of chemists, in theory, it must be in a chemical method of artificial nitrogen fixation, which can directly turn the nitrogen in the air into amino groups and nitrogroups that can be used by plants, and the difficulty is how to disassemble nitrogen.
Haber knew that this was the most cutting-edge research direction at that time, the Americans were trying to bombard with artificial lightning, and the British and French chemists planned to use high temperature and high pressure to brute-force crack.
After studying these samples, Hubble said, why don't we use catalysts to overcome rigidity with softness?
Then, Haber restored the experiment according to the description in the letter, he suspected that the iron in the chemical boiler acted as a catalyst, so after an experimental operation, he did get ammonia, but the yield was too low, only less than five parts per 100,000 (< 0.005%) of ammonia content, it seems to have production value at all, and it is a waste of work.
But in the end, ammonia was synthesized, so Haber wrote his reactions, experimental methods, and calculation methods into papers and published them.
*Thermodynamics of technical gas reactions,N2+3H2 2NH3,ΔH=-92.4↔kJ/mol*
At that time, there was a German chemist named Walther Nernst, who was only four years older than Hubble, had just discovered the third law of thermodynamics, and was competing with Hubble for the status of the star of chemistry, and he was bent on suppressing Hubble, so he posted a ridicule, saying, our Dr. Harb must have ignored the nitrogen content of the equipment itself, I suggest that Dr. Harb look at the laws of thermodynamics, and then use the correct method to recalculate.
Now Haber was angry, he didn't want to be fashionable, but now that Nenst is blocking the door, he must synthesize more ammonia to show him.
6 years later...
Who knows that 6 years have passed in the blink of an eye, and Haber really hasn't been able to synthesize more ammonia to show Nenst.
But Hubble knew that it was all a pot of catalysts, a catalyst that was an intermediary involved in the reaction and reduced the energy required for the reaction.
If you can find a catalyst that reduces the reaction temperature to four or five hundred degrees and the reaction pressure to one or two hundred standard atmospheres, then you can succeed.
But in the past 6 years, Haber has tried countless catalysts, but he can't find it at all.
At the time, Haber was working as a consultant for a light bulb factory, which was also looking for a better wick material than tungsten filament.
So, in the process of the light bulb experiment, Hubble paid attention to an element called osmium, and his intuition told Hubble that osmium may be the catalyst he was looking for.
Haber then took some osmium from the bulb factory.
Then, on July 2, 1909, Hubble added 100g of osmium powder to the reactor and began to slowly heat up and pressurize, and then, when the pressure and temperature reached 175 standard atmospheres and 550 °C respectively, a few drops of ammonia dripped out of the guide, Hubble rushed out of the laboratory excitedly, he was shouting, all down, all down, I got ammonia.
This time, Haber did not rush to publish the paper, but directly informed BASF, a super chemical group that still exists in Germany.
BASF immediately sent the top industrialization team of the time, led by Carl Bosch, the uncle of today's Bosch Electric founder, who quickly helped Hubble industrialize this ammonia production method and transplant it into a chemical plant called Oppau, which produces 5 tons of ammonia per day.
Even today, this industrial method of producing ammonia has not changed much, and is still called the Haber Process, or the Aber-Bosch Process.
At that time, this was simply the black technology of Zenith Star.
Looking at the Opa factory transporting tons of ammonia every day, chemists are saying that Haber is the savior, the one who synthesizes bread from the air.
Sure enough, since Haber, the average yield of global crops has increased fourfold, and the population has increased from 1.8 billion to 7.7 billion, exactly a little more than four times.
This is why the real reason why Hubble feeds half of today's population is his invention, which allows humans to master the ability to use nitrogen to make ammonia fertilizer, in a sense, you and I are fed by Hubble today, because, even in addition to food, you and I still have at least half of the nitrogen in our bodies, which is derived from the Haber method, and these nitrogen elements are the basic elements that make up your DNA, RNA and other important molecules.
Therefore, since then, Hubble has become a well-deserved chemical star, not only making countless dollars through the patent of synthetic ammonia, but also being promoted by the Kaiser to become the director of the Chemical Research Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, at the same time, Einstein, Bonn, Planck, these German scientists of the same period have also become Haber's good friends.
Einstein, in particular, had a very good personal relationship with Hubble, and in 1914, when Einstein was removed from the house by his first wife, he lived in Haber's house for a long time.
But how did such a chemical star become a hell poisoner in the eyes of scientists in 1918, when the Nobel Prize was awarded?
The story behind this, we can probably start from an old news 2 years ago...
Lebanon 2020
Two years ago, a large explosion occurred in the Lebanese capital, and the explosion scene was recorded by many netizens, and a mushroom cloud rose at the scene, which looked very terrifying.
In fact, the explosion was caused by a fire in an ammonium nitrate plant.
Ammonium nitrate plant, that is, a chemical plant that uses the Haber process to produce ammonium nitrate.
As we said earlier, nitrogen has three chemical bonds, which are very stable, and it takes high temperature and pressure to open these three chemical bonds with great energy.
But by the same token, when these three chemical bonds are re-formed, it will also release a huge amount of energy.
For example, TNT, trinitrotoluene explosion, 2C7H5N3O6 → 12CO + 5H2 + 3N2 + 2C
Nobel explosives, nitroglycerin explosion, 4C3H5N3O9→ 12CO2+10H2O+5N2+2NO
Including ammonium nitrate explosion, 2NH4NO3→4H2O + 2N2 + O2
In these reactions, a large amount of nitrogen is formed.
So, this is the chemistry of the Lebanese explosion, 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate was detonated, and a man-made earthquake measuring 3.3 on the Richter scale was directly detected by the Mediterranean Seismic Center.
And behind these ammonium nitrates, what do you think of?
Just when Haber's career was booming, in 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II brazenly launched the First World War, and unlike Einstein, who condemned the war, Haber was a patriot.
Immediately after the outbreak of war, he volunteered and said his expertise could be used to serve his country.
So soon after, the military received a letter from Haber, saying that the German ammunition was running out, and the ammonium nitrate I produced was not only the most efficient fertilizer, but also the most powerful explosive.
Haber then began to lobby the factories that made fertilizers, and if the factories wanted to, Haber could turn their production lines into assembly lines for the production of explosives overnight, and in this way, a steady stream of nitrifying explosives was sent to the arsenal, turned into artillery shells, turned into torpedoes, and the German army marched all the way.
But not long after, the Germans fell into a quagmire again, because, on the long army line, trenches crisscrossed, the Germans could not advance at all.
At the same time, a new weapon appeared on the French front - tear gas.
So, in February 1915, Haber was invited to participate in a field test of German chemical weapons, and this photo was left at the scene, Haber wearing a military uniform, pointing to his hand and saying, "This weapons solution will not work, I can do better."
Haber said that he could create a superweapon that was heavier than air, could sink into the opponent's trench, and only needed extremely low concentrations to kill all the soldiers in the trench, and the military thought that Hubble was bragging.
But back in the lab, Haber's colleagues asked him – Are you going to use chlorine?
That's inhumane, chlorine reacts with water in the eyes, nose, respiratory tract and alveoli to produce hydrochloric acid and hypochlorous acid, are you going to burn and drown everyone alive on land? The Hague Convention also prohibits the use of poison gas bombs.
Haber countered that it was the French who used chemical weapons first, not to mention, death is death, there is no humane inhumane problem, there is no difference between dying from flying shrapnel or dying from poison gas, do not say that poison gas is more evil than shrapnel, on the contrary, poison gas is less mutilated to the human body than those shrapnel.
By April 22, Haber personally came to the Belgian front, where he organized a chemical unit of 150 scientists and more than 1,300 technicians, who took advantage of the wind to release 168 tons of chlorine gas...
The thick poisonous gas was like a yellow-green wall, step by step flooded the trenches of the Entente army, the soldiers climbed out of the trenches one by one, and the death was extremely cruel, even the Germans who followed behind the wall did not expect that Haber's weapons turned out to be so terrifying, there was silence on the position, and even the groans could not be heard ...
In this way, in the first attack, more than 5,000 Entente troops were killed and more than 15,000 wounded.
Looking at the silent battlefield, one of Haber's assistants (Otto Hahn) asked him, Have we released demons from hell?
Haber reassured him that if this could bring the war to an end quickly, countless people would be saved.
*The Alchemy of Air – Thomas Hager. The Alchemy of Air）》*
Another person recalled that during the months of weapons development, Haber always rushed to the front line with enthusiasm, fearlessly crossing the test area again and again, and his wife, who seemed to be a very nervous lady, had fiercely opposed Haber accompanying the gas force to the front.
But then Haber went anyway, and on May 1, when Haber returned in triumph, another incident happened.
Clara
Haber's wife was Clara Immerwahr, and like Haber, she was Jewish.
Their ancestors ran a royal business, their father owned a large sugar factory and was in charge of Habermen, and Clara was also a super student.
She was the first female doctor of chemistry at the University of Prussian Reslau (now the University of Wroclaw).
At the time, Clara was a mass star who symbolized modern women.
But at the May 1 gala dinner, Clara seemed to have been absent-minded, and everyone else was congratulating her husband on his promotion to captain, and she only responded with a smile.
At the end of the banquet, Hubble took a few sleeping pills and was ready for a good night's sleep, but late that night, Clara took out Haber's pistol, walked alone into the courtyard, and then shot herself in the heart.
The gunfire woke up his 12-year-old son, Hermann Haber, who ran into the courtyard, holding his mother in a pool of blood and watching helplessly as she died in his arms.
Early the next morning, our Captain Haber, but as usual, boarded the train to the Eastern Front, and he had to rush over to instruct the troops there to use chlorine gas...
Some say Clara committed suicide because she was ashamed of her husband's actions.
But in fact, this is an eternal case, and we still don't know why she did it.
Later, many biographers pointed out that shame may only be the last straw that crushes the spirit, and in married life, Clara sacrificed a lot for Haber, who was a man obsessed with experimentation, dumping his family and frail son to Clara, and Clara lost her life.
She was also a chemical genius, and it is even possible that the experimental data of Haber's ammonia production that year was all calculated by her husband behind her back.
One year, Clara carefully prepared for several months of academic exchanges, but when she arrived, she contracted diphtheria due to the care of Haber and could not participate.
She once told a friend in a letter that everyone has the right to live their own life, but there is no right to cultivate quirks while being high and contemptuous of others, and in normal life, I think that even a genius should not have this behavior, unless he lives alone on an abandoned island, how many honors Haber has gained in these eight years, how much I have lost, and even those left to me, are all strong dissatisfaction... I was so depressed that it was better to live than to die.
It can be seen that Clara's marriage to Haber is already full of frustration, even if there is no dispute about chemical weapons.
After Clara's suicide, Haber continued to work in the laboratory, continuing to research chemical weapons, gas masks, and various pesticides that could further increase food production.
By 1917, Haber was in charge of a large national institute.
The institute employs more than 1,500 employees and more than 150 scientists who work day and night to deliver even more brutal chemical weapons like mustard gas to the Germans.
According to statistics, in World War I, at least 50,000 tons of poison gas were used in the war, causing more than 1 million people to be disabled or injured, and at least 85,000 people to die directly.
Later, on November 11, 1918, Germany surrendered.
Huge war reparations and the collapse of the national economy followed, and the wealth of the Haber family was emptied overnight.
But even in this case, Haber still told the German government that the war was not over, that my institute could extract gold from the sea, and that Germany would soon be able to pay off the reparations and come out of the haze.
However, after 3 years of research, Haber found that the true gold content of seawater (0.01 mg/tonne) was 100 times lower than he had estimated, and this solution simply did not work.
1933 Nazi Germany
Soon, in 1933, Germany became Nazi, and Haber was a Jew who was still targeted despite his non-Judaism.
At that time, Haber had a good friend named Planck, a leading expert who was helping Germany develop an atomic bomb, and it was he who personally guaranteed that Hubble escaped some of the early anti-Semitic policies.
However, the policy slowly became stricter, and Haber's institute still had a large number of Jewish employees, and the government ordered Haber to fire these employees immediately.
Haber knew what the consequences would be, and he couldn't bear to do it, but what could he do?
Although he has always been fanatical in love with Germany, but now he has not also become the mouth of patriots - the children and grandchildren of Jewish profiteers? I, a Jew, can't protect my colleagues ...
So Haber chose to escape, and like Einstein at the time, he chose to go into exile.
But just a year later, Mr. Haber, 65, died of a heart attack in a hotel in Basel, Switzerland.
Before his death, Haber left a will, saying that he hoped to bury his ashes with Clara, and asked his tombstone to write a sentence that he would serve his motherland, no matter war and peace, ever, as long as the motherland needs him. （He served his country in war and peace as long as was granted him）。
Today, the tombstone of Haber and Clara's joint burial still lies in the cemetery in Basel, Switzerland, and the descendants fulfilled Haber's first last wish, but the second last wish, that sentence, did not appear on the tombstone.
Haber's institute also developed a very useful cyanide insecticide during World War I.
Then. Haber believes that this insecticide is too toxic and the smell is too weak, and if it leaks, it can easily cause accidental injury.
Therefore, Haber asked to add a very unpleasant odorous substance to the insecticide to ensure its safety, and then named it Zyklon.
But no one could have imagined that just 10 years after Haber's death, the government ordered scientists at the institute to remove the stench from Ziklon.
Let it turn into a colorless and odorless poison gas, officials are satisfied, and then this new type of Zyklon-B was used in concentration camps where Jews were held...
New stories...
In 2005, a biographer found such short stories from historical sources.
It turned out that Haber said in a letter to a friend more than a month after Clara's death,...... I heard from the bottom of my heart what the poor woman had said.
In the exhausted hallucination, I saw her head rise from the pile of orders and telegrams, and I felt deep pain...
In addition, when Haber was in charge of the institute, he would buy clothes for the children of mechanics and gardeners every year, and in 1933, while Haber refused to fire these Jewish employees, Planck was also campaigning for Haber, and he even met Hitler himself, but he still did not relent.
After Haber's death, Einstein also traveled back and forth, helping him rescue the children from Germany and bring them to the United States.
However, in 1946, Haber's eldest son, employed by the 12-year-old Harper who was holding his mother at the age of 12, and like his mother, he committed suicide with a pistol in the courtyard without leaving a last word...
Soon after, the eldest daughter of the eldest son, the eldest granddaughter of Haber, committed suicide in the same way, like a spell.
Many years later, when someone asked Einstein how to evaluate Hubble, Einstein said that this was a tragedy for German Jews, a tragedy of unrequited love...
“It was the tragedy of German Jew: the tragedy of unrequited love.”
Well, today's story is shared here, thank you.
In the end, Madame said, this is really a tragedy that is difficult to accept and cannot be commented on.
(End)