1918 nobel prize for chemistry is probably the most important nobel prize ever awarded. It it was given to german scientist fritz haber for solving one of the biggest problems has ever faced his investment he's directly responsible for the lives of four billion people today wait. He said. What responsible for the vanity has ever faced his invention is directly responsible for the lives of four billion people today.

But when he received his prize. Many of his peers as we saw the video on these on screen. This is the video. The the excerpt this is taking from because we've seen what the guy did that was wrong.

I think. This is the one that did that was right refused to attend two other nobel prize winners rejected their awards in protest and the new york times wrote a scathing article about him. He is simultaneously one of the most impactful and tragic scientists of all time perhaps more than any other single person he has shaped the world we live in today yeah guys people. I think the interviewer said that we are all less intelligent literally because of him we literally lost iq points we literally globally lost iq points because of some something like that part of this video is sponsored by ren.

Oh. A different guy. I'm sorry okay. Me more about them at the end of the show.

If you are an american citizen. And you find an island with a lot of bird poop on it well then you can claim that island for the united states and the us. Will have your back the president is authorized to send in the navy and the army to defend your newly discovered poop covered island. There are currently 10 american islands that were claimed in this way.

And even though the law that made this possible was passed in 1856. It is still in effect to this day. So why did people want poop covered islands. So badly huh.

There are a few dozen islands off the coast of peru where millions of seabirds gather to mate the waters near the island are full of fish and these millions of birds eat the fish and then they poop a lot since the region is hot and dry this poop solidifies and accumulates over millennia. There are cliffs of bird poop 30 meters or a hundred feet high technically bird poop is called guano and by the mid 1800s buying and selling bird guano was big business. The price rose as high as 76 dollars per pound. I mean that's a lot of people though you could trade four pounds of guano for one pound of gold.

What so why was there such a big market for bird poop. Well to answer that we have to look inside the human body by weight. Most of our bodies are made up of oxygen carbon and hydrogen. But the fourth most common element is nitrogen nitrogen is part of the amino acids that form proteins it's part of hemoglobin.

The compound that carries oxygen and red blood cells. And it's a central component of dna and rna nitrogen is essential for all life on earth we get our nitrogen by eating plants or animals. Which have eaten plants isn't that what they have the problem is if you farm the same soil year after year. You harvest.

The nitrogen out of it and eventually there isn't enough nitrogen for healthy plants to grow. They can't produce enough chlorophyll to photosynthesize. Which stunts their growth their leaves turn yellow and they are more susceptible to pests and disease crucially for farmers nitrogen deficiency means. Smaller yields the way to fix.

This is to add nitrogen back into the soil. Which is where bird guano comes. In 20 nitrogen hundreds of years ago. Incan farmers realized that adding guano to their soil made crops grow taller.

This is what allowed them to grow food in places that were previously unfarmable and expand their empire is pretty good south america's rich deposits of bird poop did not go unnoticed by the rest of the world in 1865. Spain. Went to war against its former colonies of peru chile. Ecuador and bolivia for control of their guano laden islands.

But such was the world's appetite for nitrogen that by 1872 what guano was only bird coupe though humans grew banned further exports the world would need another way to get its nitrogen fixed. This was a crisis william crooks. A british chemist made a dire prophecy in 1898 with the world's growing population and dwindling supplies of nitrogen. He said.

We stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat in less than 30 years time. He argued people all over the world will be dying of starvation. But he also proposed a solution. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue.

It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty because here's the thing nitrogen isn't rare. It's common seventy eight percent of the air is nitrogen. But how do you but it's in a form that plants and animals can't use two atoms of nitrogen triple bonded. Together this bond is one of the strongest in nature.

The way to measure the strength of a chemical bond is by the amount of energy. That's required to break it so to break apart two chlorine atoms for example would take two and a half electron volts to break apart two. Carbons. Requires.

38 ev two oxygens 52. Ev. But to break apart. Two atoms of nitrogen.

Oh require. Oh is this is this uh electrons of valance. Or some. Ev.

Is that what it is in. Chemistry. Oh. Off then.

Fires. 98. Electron. Volts.

A tremendous amount of energy. Electron volt. Oh okay. Oh whatever dude you guys.

I yeah i saw this in in chemistry. I had chemistry and physics okay. It's like um whatever there are two processes that do this naturally lightning releases. So much energy it breaks apart n2 into individual nitrogen atoms.

They then quickly react to form nitrogen oxides and these molecules stay in the atmosphere. Until they react with water droplets in clouds and fall to the ground in rain. There are also a few types of bacteria living in soil that can break the n2 bond. Using a tremendous amount of energy to do so they make nitrogen available for plants.

But bacteria only replenish the nitrogen slowly and there's not enough lightning to produce nitrogen compounds at scale. So chemists tried that georgic hildebrandt mixed nitrogen and hydrogen in a sealed flask trying to make ammonia. One of the nitrogen containing molecules found in guano. When that didn't work he submerged the flask 300 meters underwater to increase the pressure that didn't work either.

But he was on the right track increasingly sophisticated versions of these experiments were carried out over the following hundred years all of them failed so when fritz haber became interested in this problem in 1904. He was joining a long line of failed chemists. He was 36 years old working as a low level academic at the university of karlsruhe. He was also a new father with a two year old boy named hermann and a wife.

Clara. Who was one of the first women to get a phd in chemistry driven by pride and competition with another scientist haber spent five years on the problem. Why she had a career and they can combine nitrogen and hydrogen not only at high pressure. But also at high temperature.

And in the presence of a catalyst. Something that lowers the amount of energy required to split diatomic nitrogen so we do not allow that to happen. None of my environmental apparatus. Had to be invented haber worked tirelessly on this project building equipment that could tolerate ever higher temperatures and pressures.

He also got lucky at the time. He was moonlighting as a technical consultant for a light bulb manufacturer. So there he had access to lots of really hard to find materials like the element. Osmium osmium is rare in his day.

There was only about 100 kilograms of the refined metal in existence. But the company he worked for was experimenting with using it for filaments in their light bulbs. So they had most of the world's supply harbor suspected. It might make the perfect catalyst.

So he brought a sample back to his lab. And there in the third week of march 1909 haber placed his sheet of osmium in the pressure chamber. And then he pressurized and heated the nitrogen and hydrogen to 200 atmospheres and 500. Degrees.

Celsius. Under these conditions. The triple bonds broke apart and nitrogen reacted with hydrogen of the total gas mixture six percent turned into ammonia when the gas was cooled one milliliter of ammonia dripped out the end of a narrow tube into a beaker. An elated hobber rushed from one lab to another yelling come on down.

There's ammonia. Germany's biggest chemical company basf commercialized hauber's process. Within four years. They had opened a factory in oppao producing five tons of ammonia per day jesus.

People spoke of making bread from the air with the fertilizer from this industrial process on the same plot of land farmers were able to grow four times as much food jesus as a result. The population of the earth quadrupled there's a good chance you owe your life to hauber's invention. The earth supports four billion more people today than it could without nitrogen fertility. That's crazy man in fact around 50 of the nitrogen atoms in your body came from the harbor process.

Wait wait how long do you think it would have taken it for somebody to figure it out if it wasn't him who brought that thing home from that factory that that that combined bunch of random. Lucky elements anything in a bunch of time the invention made fritz haber. A wealthy man. He got a promotion becoming the founding director of the kaiser wilhelm institute.

For physical chemistry in berlin. He also befriended some of the best scientists of his day. Including max planck max. Born and albert einstein.

No one knows after einstein separated from his first wife in 1914. He stayed the night at hauber's house. But if haber was so well regarded why was he shunned by colleagues when he won the nobel prize well it all comes down to what happened in world war one oh. He got cancelled when the war broke out haber volunteered for military duty.

Unlike pacifist einstein. Who denounced the war haber was a patriot he wanted to use his expertise to help his country. Only a few months into the war monster army was already running out of gunpowder and explosives. It's gotta be that ammonium nitrate.

Besides being an excellent fertilizer is also an explosive just look at what happened in beirut in august of 2020. A warehouse containing almost 3 000. Tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire and in the extreme heat. The fertilizer detonated.

The blast which could be heard hundreds of kilometers away killed at least 217 people and injured thousands more seismometers registered an artificial earthquake measuring 33. On the richter scale. This is just one of many fertilizer related explosions. The pop up plant.

Where haber's process was first put into practice would also explode in 1921 and the reason is nitrogen guys we i i did i did a presentation okay in school about earthquakes again. I know that's that scale is exponential it goes from that number isn't that crazy okay. Japan. Japan would like to have a ward with you about earthquakes okay when it comes down to that magnet magnitude.

We've already seen that it takes a tremendous amount of energy that's what it is then break apart nitrogen's triple bond. But the flip side of that coin is that when two nitrogen atoms come together and form that bond. A huge amount of energy is released the explosions of gunpowder tnt nitroglycerin and ammonium nitrate all form diatomic nitrogen gas as a product and the formation of that triple bond is where these chemicals derive much of their explosive energy haber lobbied to convert the factories using his process to make ammonia for fertilizer to create nitrate for explosives instead his superiors believed such a conversion to be impossible. But haber persisted and soon his chemical process was at the heart of the german war machine.

From bread out of the air to bombs out of the air. Oh okay. But haber thought chemistry could make an even bigger contribution to the war in december. 1914.

He witnessed a chemical weapons test. He was i knew this haber believed that he could do better he set out to make a gas that was deadly at low concentrations and heavier than air so it would sink into enemy trenches projectiles carrying chemical weapons were banned at least in theory by the hague convention of 1899 but in practice after the start of the war germany and britain all right but they still used it experiments chemical weapons haber converted his wing of the institute into a chemical weapons laboratory and after only a few months of work he zeroed in on chlorine gas. An employee otto han. Expressed his discomfort about the new weapon.

Haber told. Him innumerable human lives would be saved. If the war could be ended more quickly in this way. Oh at 6 pm on the 22nd of april with the wind blowing toward the allied trenches german troops released 168 tons of chlorine from yeah they did they say you know in breaking bad.

They said whenever they're making the meth whatever they're saying that uh one bad a reaction right if you it up during the meth process whatever and you get muscle gas is what you said no applied trenches german troops released 168 tons of chlorine from over 5 000 gas cylinders the wall of gas advanced across the battlefield since chlorine gas is two and a half times heavier than air. It sank into the trenches of the allied soldiers any soldier that inhaled a lung full of the gas suffered a terrible death. It's so bad chlorine irritates. The mucous lining of the lungs so violently that they fill with liquid the soldiers effectively drowned on dry land more than 5 000.

Allied soldiers died this way in the first attack haber was promoted to the rank of captain and a week later he was back home in berlin. On the first of may. The hobbers hosted a dinner party and after the party wound down fritz took sleeping pills and went to bed. But that night his wife clara took his gun and went outside into the garden.

And there she fired a single shot into her chest her 12 year old. Son. Hermann heard the shot and ran outside to find his mother as she lay dying the next morning. Fritz haber was on a train to the eastern front to supervise a gas attack on the russian army can i get a welcome some have claimed clara killed.

Herself because of her husband's obsession with chemical weapons and that may have been part of it. But honestly we don't know because no first hand accounts survive that support this interpretation. What we do know is that clara was deeply unhappy in her marriage in 1910. After being married for eight years to fritz.

She wrote to a friend. What fritz has won during these eight years that and still more i have lost. And what remains ahead of me fills. Me with the deepest dissatisfaction.

Oh. After clara's suicide hover spent the rest of the war running his institute researching chemical weapons gas masks and pesticides by 1917 the institute employed 1500 people including 150 scientists. It was like a mini manhattan project. But for chemical weapons.

In total one hundred thousand soldiers were killed by chemical weapons in world war one when germany surrendered haber was crushed all the money he made from his ammonia patent was lost to hyperinflation in an attempt to pay off germany's crippling war debt. He tried to distill gold from seawater. But the project was futile oh in 1933. The nazis came to power and passed a law that all jewish civil servants.

Including scientists this guy would be fired from their jobs haber was jewish. But he never practiced the religion regardless his military service exempted him from the law. But he resigned from his role as director in solidarity. With all the jewish scientists who worked at the institute.

The next year in a hotel room in basel at that point. He had kind of fallen off. Anyway right blind. He died of heart failure.

Interesting immediately after world war. One habers institute developed a cyanide based insecticide it had a barely detectable odor so they mixed in a foul smelling chemical to alert people to the danger the resulting gas was called zyklon b a decade after haber's death. The nazis requested chemists remove the foul smelling component and this form of zyklon b. The chemical developed at habers institute.

Was then used to perpetrate the holocaust thinking about this story. It would be easy to paint haber as a villain or as a hero for inventing. The process used to feed half the world. But another approach is to regard him as irrelevant to the larger story because someone else would have figured out a way to process nitrogen out of the air and other scientists were developing chemical weapons over the past few centuries.

Science and technology have improved our lives immeasurably. But they have also given us ever increasing ways to destroy ourselves. I think it'd be great to believe that we could ask scientists to only work on problems that are good for humanity. But the reality is that every bit of information is a potential double edged sword.

You don't know the outcome of your research or how what if by finding out that gas. It is some other other thing that happened right and it discovered some crazy that saved everybody right it might later be used ammonium nitrate is both a fertilizer and an explosive. So the real question is how do we keep increasing our knowledge and control of the natural world without destroying ourselves. And everything else on this planet in the process.

Yeah. I know vagrant was done i accidentally. I know that the pills that make you go hard. When you when you're softy.

So chemistry has made it possible for eight billion of us to live on this planet. And to have the standard of living that we do now as a byproduct. We've changed the atmosphere and now we're suffering the concept bye.