Fritz Haber

Fritz Haber (Breslau, Prussia —now Wrocław, Poland—, December 9, 1868-Basel, Switzerland, January 29, 1934) was a German chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize. of Chemistry in 1918 for developing the synthesis of ammonium, important for fertilizers and chemistry. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method of evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. He has also been described as the "father of chemical warfare" for his work on the development and deployment of dichlorine (formerly chlorine) gas and other poison gases during World War I.

Biography

He was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family. His was one of the oldest families in the city. Haber later converted for convenience from Judaism to Christianity. His mother died during childbirth. His father was a well-known merchant in the city. From 1886 to 1891, he studied at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen, at the University of Berlin (now the Humboldt University of Berlin) in the group of August Wilhelm von Hofmann, and at the Charlottenburg Higher Technical School (now the University Berlin Technique) with Carl Theodor Liebermann. He married Clara Immerwahr in 1901. Haber began his research with the aim of changing the world by inventing agricultural fertilizer thanks to which it is estimated that he saved 4 billion people from famine, however, at the outbreak of the First World War, he applied his studies to the development of chemical weapons that cost countless lives. Clara was also a chemist and opposed Haber's work on chemical warfare. It is believed that after an argument with Haber over her involvement in the war, she committed suicide. His son, Hermann, born in 1902, later took her own life as well in shame for his father's work, chemical warfare. Before starting his own academic career, he worked in his father's chemical business and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich with Georg Lunge.

Nobel Prize

During their stay at the University of Karlsruhe from 1894 to 1911, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed the Haber process, which is the catalytic synthesis of ammonium from atmospheric dihydrogen and dinitrogen under conditions of high temperature and pressure.

In 1918 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.

The Haber-Bosch process was a milestone in the chemical industry, since it made the synthesis of ammonium and nitrogenous products, such as fertilizers, explosives and chemical raw materials, independent from natural deposits, especially sodium nitrate (saltpeter).), of which Chile was one of the main (and almost the only) producers. The production of mined natural nitrate in Chile fell from 2.5 million metric tons in 1925 (sold at $45 per ton using 60,000 workers) to just 800,000 tons in 1934 (at a price of $19 per ton using to 14,133 workers).

He also investigated combustion reactions, the separation of gold from seawater, absorption effects, electrochemistry, and free radical research (see Fenton's reagent). Much of his work from 1911 to 1933 was carried out at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. In 1953, this institute was renamed after him. He is sometimes wrongly credited with the first synthesis of MDMA (which was first synthesized by Merck KGaA chemist Anton Köllisch in 1912).

World War I

Haber played an important role in the development of chemical warfare in World War I. Part of this work included the development of gas masks with absorbent filters. In addition to directing the teams to develop dichlorine gas and other lethal gases to be used in trench warfare. Haber personally arranged for the release of the lethal gas for the first time during the Second Battle of Ypres (April 22-May 25, 1915) in Belgium despite being prohibited by the 1907 Hague Convention (of which Germany was a signatory country). Future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz and Otto Hahn were gas soldiers in Haber's unit.

The gas war in World War I was, in a sense, the chemical war, and Haber faced off against Victor Grignard, a French Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. Concerning war and peace, Haber once said:

"In times of peace, a scientist belongs to the world, but in times of war he belongs to his country."

His first wife, Clara, a fellow chemist and the first woman to earn a PhD at the University of Wroclaw, committed suicide with a revolver in their garden, possibly in response to Haber personally supervising the first successful use of dichloro in the Second Battle of Ypres, on April 22, 1915. He shot himself in the heart on May 15, and died shortly thereafter. That same morning, Haber went to the Eastern Front to supervise the release of gas against the Russians.

Haber was a German patriot who was proud of his service during World War I, for which he was decorated. Even the kaiser, Wilhelm II of Germany, gave him the rank of captain, a rare case for a scientist too old for military service.

In his studies of the effects of poisonous gases, Haber noted that long-term exposure to a low concentration often had the same effect (death) as short-term exposure to a high concentration. He formulated a simple mathematical relationship between the concentration of the gas and the exposure time required. This relationship is known as Haber's rule.

Haber defended the gas war against charges that it was inhumane, saying that death was death, by any means inflicted. During the 1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the formulation of gas Zyklon A cyanide gas, which was used as an insecticide, especially as a fumigant in grain stores. The Nazis refined Haber's original work into Zyklon B, a lethal variant. During the Holocaust it was used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and in other camps in the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and others considered by the Third Reich to be inferior races or socially unwanted.

After the war

In the 1920s, Haber extensively searched for a method of extracting gold from seawater and published a series of scientific papers on the subject. After years of research, he concluded that the concentration of dissolved gold in seawater was much lower than reported by previous researchers, and that mining for gold from seawater was not profitable.

Haber's genius was recognized by the Nazis, who offered him special funding to continue his weapons research. But since his fellow Jewish scientists had already been banned from working in the Reich, he left Germany in 1933. His Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and subsequent contributions to Germany's war efforts in the form of chemical fertilizers, explosives, and munitions from poison, were not enough to prevent the final defamation of his heritage by the Nazi regime.

He moved to Cambridge, England, along with his assistant J. J. Weiss, for a few months, during which time Ernest Rutherford pointedly refused to shake his hand because of his involvement in poison gas warfare. Haber received an offer from Chaim Weizmann for the position of director at the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute), in Rehovot, in Mandate Palestine, and accepted it. He left for what is now Israel in January 1934, after recovering from a heart attack. His ill health impaired his ability to fend for himself and on January 29, 1934, at the age of 65, he died of heart failure in a Basel hotel, where he was resting on his way to the Middle East. East. He was cremated and his ashes, along with Clara's ashes, were buried in the Hörnli Cemetery, Basel. In his will, he ordered that his extensive private library be donated to the Sieff Institute.

Haber's immediate family also left Germany. His second wife, Charlotte, with her two children, settled in England. Hermann, the son of his first marriage, immigrated to the United States during World War II. He committed suicide in 1946. Other members of the de Haber family died in concentration camps. One of his sons, Ludwig (& # 34; Lutz & # 34;) Fritz Haber (1921-2004), became an eminent historian of chemical warfare in World War I and published a book entitled The Poison Cloud (1986).

Published Works

His main work is entitled Thermodynamik technischer Gasreaktionen (1905). English title: Thermodynamics of technical gas-reactions

Some of the most important are:

(1898) - Grundriss der technischen Elektrochemie auf theoretischer Grundlage

(1924) - Practical Results of the Theoretical Development of Chemistry

(1927) - Aus Leben und Beruf: Aufsätƶe · Reden · Vorträge

(1928) - Über Zündung des Knallgases Durch Wasserstoffatome

Fünf Vorträge aus den Jahren 1920–1923. (1924). New edition under the title: Die Chemie im Kriege – Fünf Vorträge (1920–1923) über Giftgas, Sprengstoff und Kunstdünger im Ersten Weltkrieg. Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-945831-26-7

Eponymy

• Moon crater Haber carries this name in his memory.