Fritz Haber was born on December 9th, 1868. The son of a merchant, he was driven by greater ambitions than small town life. His was the first generation of German Jews to be welcomed into wider society. In Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, Jews had social mobility. They could be judged on their individual abilities and achievements, rather than who their parents and grandparents were. The future was constrained only by their imagination. As Haber wrote

Educated in Breslau, he took an early interest in chemistry and followed this passion through university. By 1890 Haber had become a professor of chemistry and electrochemistry at the Karlshruhe Institute of Technology.

That year, Haber met and fell in love with his future wife, Clara Immerwar.

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A wealthy Jewish farm girl with a thirst for knowledge, Clara been privately tutored throughout her youth and was fascinated by the natural sciences. Brilliant, hard-headed, and unwilling to accept her gender’s place in society, she’d moved to Breslau to attend a teacher’s seminary where she focused on chemistry. There she met Fritz Haber at a dancing lesson. Despite their immediate spark, Clara refused his offer of marriage to remain financially independent and continue her studies.

By the time Clara met Haber again in 1901, she had become the first woman in Germany to pass the rigorous national entrance exam for pre-doctoral chemistry, as well as the first to be awarded a doctorate in chemistry from any German university, graduating magna cum laude. Haber courted her again and their relationship was rekindled. Clara loved Haber not just for his mind and his success, but for his other endearing qualities. He was a gregarious and outgoing man who loved good jokes. He was also loyal and devoted to his friends. Later in life, he would help his close friend and collegue Albert Einstein through Einstein’s divorce. He attracted a circle of brilliant and devoted young scientists around him, including future Nobel Prize winner James Franck and the great Lise Meitner, who with Otto Hahn made the crucial breakthrough in nuclear fission.

Clara married Haber soon after their second meeting. By January, 1902 their son Hermann was born and they settled into Karlshruhe in southern Germany. Clara’s initial hopes of combining marriage and her research-intensive career were dashed by the overwhelming demands of housekeeping and motherhood. Besides caring for her sickly son, her husband’s ambitious and friendly nature led to frequent dinner parties where he entertained important guests. Clara struck a balance between science and homelife by assisting her husband in his research. In the front page of his 1905 textbook on the thermodynamics of gas reaction was a dedication to his

Meanwhile, Fritz Haber was working on solving a crisis that had come to the fore for Germany in the late 1800s. The country had the sunlight and the land to feed 30 million people. However, without a way to fertilize the crops, another 20 million citizens would face starvation. The solution to the problem was frustratingly simple. It had been discovered in the 1840s, when Justus Von Liebig identified nitrogen as essential in the creation of plant cell walls. The amount of crops one can grow is directly tied to how much nitrogen can be provided. There was no problem in finding that element. It literally was right in front of everyone’s face, and everywhere else in the universe. 4,000 trillion tons of gas, making up nearly 80% of our atmosphere. Beyond our atmosphere, it’s the fifth most abundant element in the universe.

But there was no way to get it out of the air.

The challenge of capturing nitrogen was its strong trivalent bonds. The element’s free floating atoms clung to each other fiercely. An energy source powerful enough to separate them seemed impossible to produce. Countries were forced to scrounge for the main sources of nitrogen at that time: seaweed, manure, and guano. These were such prized commodities that fortunes were made shipping bird and bat guano to Europe. In 1864, Spain and a Chillean-Peruvian alliance went to war over control of caves filled with guano, and in 1879 Chile and Peru went to war over the rights to these same precious piles of bird and bat shit. Chile’s victory in the war grew their national treasury by 900%.

At the start of the 20th century Fritz Haber figured out how to break nitrogen’s bonds. After forcing air into a huge iron tank under extreme heat and pressure, he added hydrogen into the tank. This pried the nitrogen atoms apart as they each bonded with three hydrogen atoms, forming ammonia. Out of the tank dripped liquid fertilizer. He’d done it. The nitrogen had been pulled from the air and could be put into the ground to grow food. In 1909, he unveiled his discovery to the world.

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100 million tons of synthetic fertilizer is created each year by this method. For nearly all of the 7 billion people on earth, including you, half of the nitrogen in your body comes from the Haber method. It is perhaps the greatest scientific discovery in history. It stopped wars, fed children, and led to our modern age.

This was Fritz Haber’s dream. He had both served his fatherland while being praised for his brilliance. He had brought glory to his country as a German citizen. It was a meteoric rise for a Jewish child from a provincial town, and it had taken a toll on his personal life.

The marriage began to fray as Haber regularly left Clara alone with their son due to his workaholic lifestyle. However, his ambition and dedication paid off and Haber moved his family the capitol in 1911 to take on a professorship at the University of Berlin. Haber was now socializing with the upper echelon of German society in the capital, meeting cabinet ministers as well as the Kaiser. He loved his newfound status. It both fed his already massive ego and was an enormous source of pride. He genuinely loved Germany. It was a country that believed in him. He was not simply a Jew here. He was a German citizen. As important as any of its children. Perhaps more important as he would consider himself.