Thomas Hager - The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

Ye instruments, ye surely jeer at me,
With handle, wheel and cogs and cylinder.
I stood beside the gate, ye were to be the key.
True, intricate your ward, but no bolts do ye stir.
Inscrutable upon a sunlit day,
Her veil will Nature never let you steal,
And what she will not to your mind reveal,
You will not wrest from her with levers and with screws.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, Faust

INTRODUCTION:

CREATURES OF THE AIR

THIS IS THE STORY of two men who invented a way to turn air into bread, built factories the size of small cities, made enormous fortunes, helped engineer the deaths of millions of people, and saved the lives of billions more.

Their work stands, I believe, as the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life-and-death importance for the largest number of people. Put simply, the discovery described in this book is keeping alive nearly half the people on earth.

Most people do not know the names of either the men or their invention. But we should thank them every time we take a bite of food. Their work lives today in the form of giant factories, usually located in remote areas, that drink rivers of water, inhale oceans of air, and burn about 1 percent of all the earths energy. If all the machines these men invented were shut down today, more than two billion people would starve to death.

The reason is this: We are creatures of the air. The stuff of our bodiesthe atoms that make up our skin and bones, blood, brain, and everything elsecomes primarily from the atmosphere. Sometimes the route is direct, sometimes indirect. Carbon, for instance, comes from carbon dioxide, which plants take in and turn into food. We breathe atmospheric oxygen into our blood, and hydrogen reaches us through water (along with oxygen), a substance that cycles ceaselessly among gas, liquid, and solid, evaporating up into the clouds and precipitating down into our mouths. These three elements, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, constitute more than 90 percent of our bodies by weight. You could say we are air made solid.

But the most important element in many ways for humans is the fourth most common in our bodiesand the hardest to find in nature (at least in forms we can use): nitrogen. You cant live without nitrogen. It is stitched into every gene in your DNA and is built into every protein. If you dont get enough nitrogen, you die. It is not only necessary but more interesting than the other major elements. Chemically, nitrogen is something of a trickster, a bit promiscuous, eager to join with many other types of atoms with various types of bonds, in many different ways. Nitrogen gives proteins their twists and turns, and it confers on living molecules much of their individuality and flexibility. Nitrogen spices up the party.

The absolute necessity of nitrogen for life leads to a paradox: We are swimming in nitrogen, but we can never get enough. Nitrogen gas makes up almost 80 percent of the earths atmosphere. We breathe it in and breathe it out all day long. But none of this huge store of atmospheric nitrogennot a single atom of itcan nourish any plant or animal. It is inert, unavailable, dead. Plants and animals, including humans, require nitrogen in a different form, a form scientists call fixed nitrogen. The availability, or more commonly lack, of fixed nitrogen is so important that it serves as a cap on life on earth, a limiting factor for plant systems (and hence for animals as well, since all animals depend in one way or another on plant eaters). Put in simple agricultural terms, if you put more fixed nitrogen on a field, you can grow more. Farmers have long been nitrogen experts, feeding their fields with rotting plants (compost rich with fixed nitrogen) and animal dung (manures rich with fixed nitrogen), and rotating their crops, growing peas and beans every few years because these plants carry bacteria on their roots that make fixed nitrogen available. The secret of successful farming is moving nitrogen around.

Over our heads is a vast vault of unusable nitrogen; under our feet, a limited amount of fixed nitrogen. Nature offers only two ways of fixing nitrogen, getting it out of the air and into living systems: those special bacteria on the roots of peas, beans, and a few other plants, and bolts of lightning. Both methods produce small amounts of fixed nitrogen that accumulate slowly. As a result, humans have always been faced with a shortage of usable nitrogenlike people floating on a vast sea, dying of thirst.

The problem has grown along with the human population. Thanks to these extraordinary machines, we are doubling the amount of nitrogen available to living systems. This fundamental change has made it possible to feed billions more people than the earth could support otherwise. But we are also subjecting our planet to a huge experimentflooding it with nitrogen taken from the airpoisoning rivers and lakes, killing swaths of the ocean, and boosting global warming, without any clear picture of what were doing or how it will turn out. All of this can be traced back to two relatively unknown men and their machine.

But the most direct measure of their importance can be read in the lines on graphs showing the increase in human population over the past hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, the world supported about one billion people. Today were above six billion and counting. If we all ate simple vegetarian diets and farmed every acre of arable land as wisely as possible using the best techniques of the late 1800s, the earth could support a population of around four billion people. In theory, the other two-billion-plus inhabitants should be starving, the natural result of population outstripping food supply, as doomsayers from Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich have long predicted. But despite the extra mouths, we are not hungry. In fact the average human today is eating better than he or she did a hundred years ago, with diets that are both more varied and higher in calories. That is true everywhere, not just in the United States. (Yes, pockets of starvation still happen, but it is not because of a lack of food. There is plenty of food around. People starve because of problems shipping it to the places it is needed.) Instead of facing worldwide famine, we are dealing with a global epidemic of obesity.

The reason is the Haber-Bosch system. Haber-Bosch plants are why food today is so plentiful and so relatively cheap. Haber-Bosch machines grow the plants that feed the animals and produce the oils, sugars, meats, and grains that are making us all fat. If you want to know why so many people are putting on so many pounds today, you know where to look.

Food, however, is only part of the story. Remember the terrorist bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma? The explosive used was a couple of tons of nitrogen fertilizer boosted with another nitrogen-containing compound. Fertilizer and explosives are very close in structureso close that one can often be used for the other. With a little chemical tinkering, the fertilizer from Haber-Bosch factories was turned into gunpowder and TNT. That meant that the same discovery that could feed the world could also destroy it. Haber-Bosch technology was used to make the explosives that killed millions in both world wars. Without Haber-Bosch, historians say, Germany would have run out of arms and surrendered two years earlier than it did in World War I. Without Haber-Bosch, Hitler would never have been much of a threat.