Travis - Nitrogen Capture: The Growth of an International Industry (1900-1940)

Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

In late Victorian times, the parliament of British science was the annual gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1898, the president of that august body was the recently knighted chemist Sir William Crookes (18321919), famous for his work on thallium, cathode rays, and the radiometer. Other activities prior to 1898 included a study of rare earth elements, and the identification of helium on earth (it had first been observed on the sun). Crookes had started out as a skilful analyst who learnt his trade in the 1850s as assistant to the German chemist A(ugust) Wilhelm Hofmann (18181892) at the erstwhile Royal College of Chemistry in London. Crookes did not hold an academic post, nor did he possess formal qualifications in chemistry. Instead of pursuing academic studies in an ivory tower, his career was spent as a publicist for science, and himself, mainly as editor and proprietor of the journal Chemical News , and as discoverer, inventor, consultant, and expert witness in cases of litigation concerning scientific matters. Crookes during 18711880, among his other business activities, had been a director of the Native Guano Company , founded in London in 1869 to convert unspeakable (human) waste into fertilizer. He had, in addition, dabbled in theosophy, but seems to have been mainly forgiven this and other foibles. In any case, spiritualism and occult science were fashionable if dubious topics around 1900.

The 1898 meeting of the association was held in Bristol , south-west England, a city located on the River Avon and an important maritine hub. Here were the homes of merchants who had made their fortunes from the shipping trade. The trade had once included slaves and emigrants, but by the mid-1850s it was dominated by a vast business dealing in imported South American guano, a nitrogen-containing fertilizer (bird excrement), the supply of which declined in the early 1870s, by which time Bristols port was replaced by new large docks at nearby Avonmouth . One of the main firms trading in guano , through Bristol and London, was Antony Gibbs & Sons , which by the early 1880s had shifted from guano to the import, also from South America, of another nitrogen-containing fertilizer, later named Chile saltpetre (sodium nitrate); also known as Chilean nitrate. Bristols connection with a leading natural source of nitrogen fertilizer serves to heighten the significance of what follows here.

Now, in early September 1898, as president of the association and at the cusp of his career, the scientific celebrity William Crookes stood before the assembled delegates to give the presidents address. It was both an annual rite and a rare privilege. Bespectacled and immaculately dressed, a man of sartorial style (as befitted the son of a tailor), sporting a bushy beard, and distinctive moustache, heavily waxed and tapering off at its extremities, Crookes had all the airs of a leading military gentleman or minor emperor of some faraway place. Not that his appearance was greatly different from many scientific and other notables of the day, particularly foreigners. (The German chemists Max Le Blanc and Carl Engler , for example, sported moustaches that were worthy rivals of Crookess.)

Crookes, in order to keep his audience awake for at least an hour, tackled what he perceived to be a contemporary problem with the declaration of a great peaceful campaign intended to remove the threat of famine , at least among all the wheat-eating peoples of the worldthe great Caucasian race, as he described it. His rallying call was in the form of a stark warning: unless science and technology were harnessed in the service of enhancing the supply of food, wheat in particular, this race of people would soon be faced with mass starvation. Crookes may have broken with tradition in his approach, particularly the absence of drily presented scientific facts, but he succeeded in rattling his audience, and many others, as no doubt was his intention (Fig. ).

Wheat , of which Britain was the worlds largest importer, having doubled imports per head of population since 1870, made good copy. Crookes, a wily publicist, was out to cause a stir and project his name into the headlines. Months earlier he had thrown himself into the task of preparing his presidential speech, and an extended version for distribution as a pamphlet, with his usual unstinting enthusiasm. The manuscript for the pamphlet was completed in June, then set in type, corrected and altered, and held ready waiting to be rolled out on the presses of Crookes s London printing office []. Distribution of The Wheat Problem to journalists and editors had the desired effect, garnering tremendous publicity at a level not normally achieved by scientific proceedings. Crookes wrote not only of a catastrophe little short of starvation for wheat-eaters, but indirectly scarcity for those who exist on inferior grains, together with a lower standard of living for meat-eaters, scarcity of mutton and beef, and even the extinction of gunpowder.

The problem was fertilizer, or at least a lack of the main imported source, nitrates, within a few decades. In the nineteenth century fertilizer was often referred to as manure . As Crookes explained to his audience, in a more scientific vein: It is now recognized that all crops require what is called a dominant manure. Some need nitrogen, some potash, others phosphates. Wheat, however, preeminently demands nitrogen, fixed in the form of ammonia or nitric acidnitrogen is mainly of atmospheric origin, and is rendered fixed by a slow and precarious process which requires a combination of rare meteorological and geographical conditions to enable it to advance at a sufficiently rapid rate to become of commercial importance []. Nitrogen , as he implied, was the principal source for encouraging the growth of food plants. But it was also critical to the manufacture of gunpowder and the even more devastating new explosives, the nitro compounds , mostly based on coal tar products .

Apart from the media attention, Crookes generated a fair amount of criticism and controversy, as well as responses that flatly rejected his statistical argumentation and claims. These would arouse interest in, and fuel debates over, the yields of wheat-growing areas of the world, mainly through the publication in 1899 (and a reprint in 1905), of his The Wheat ProblemRevised, with an answer to various critics []. His claims were supported in chapters authored by two Americans, agronomist John Wood Davis of Peotone, Kansas, and John Hyde , chief statistician at the Department of Agriculture , whose pronouncements also came in for criticism. However, nobody could fault Crookess chemistry when he drew attention to a specific and seemingly for most people secondary problem: the technical fixation of nitrogen from the air and its conversion into a stable compound for use as a synthetic fertilizer.

For capturing attention among those beyond the world of science and academe, the story of a possible calamity following a wheat famine was a brilliant ploy. After all, then as now, a threat to daily bread was the stuff of headlines. It was understood by everyone. But who except for a handful of chemists would give much attention to the scientific challenge? The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, Crookes explained, is one of the great discoveries, awaiting the genius of a chemist. He was of course referring to a discovery of industrial value. Crookes, in fact, anticipated what was soon to come about, the imitation in the laboratory and then on a manufacturing scale of a natural process, that of nitrogen capture by lightning. He had even dabbled with the basis of a new technological system when, six years earlier, in 1892, he had demonstrated before the Royal Society in London nitrogen capture by burning air in a flame that was concentrated by a strong induction current flowing between terminals, not unlike the beam that provided illumination from the arc lamp. Subsequently, Lord Rayleigh (18421919), in 1897, during experiments aimed at the isolation of argon from the atmosphere, employed a similar apparatus and succeeded in effecting the union of 29.4 g of mixed nitrogen and oxygen at an expenditure of one horse-power. Crookes offered a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty. As for the technology, particularly the need for vast amounts of energy, he turned to the role of inexpensive electrical power, as derived for example from the Niagara River , that would one day, conceivably, enable the production of electric nitrates . They would replace the reliance on imported Chilean nitrate , then the main source of nitrogen fertilizer, the future supply of which was so uncertain. He had every reason to project confidence in success. Electrochemistry had come of age with astonishing successes. Alpine regions, including in France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, in addition to Scandinavia and the Niagara Falls , were hydro-electric power centres of the future. No less astonishing were the accomplishments of the chemical industry, foremost in Germany, where in 1897, natural indigo dye was replicated. It was just the technology of nitrogen capture that needed to be sorted out, hopefully, as Crookes believed, by around 1930.