One of the most powerful weapons against the scourge of hunger was artificial fertilizer. Nitrogen helps plants to grow and some of it is available in manure, but not much. For more than a century, the world’s farmers used bird droppings accumulated over centuries on the coast of Chile, which contained huge quantities of sodium nitrate. But not enough of it was available. Scientists and entrepreneurs thought that there must be some way of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere, where it is abundant. The German chemist Fritz Haber, working at the chemical company BASF, was the first to solve the
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