The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

by Charles C. Mann

The world’s biggest nitrate deposits are in the high desert of northern Chile. Although it almost never rains there, the area is constantly bathed in a fine spray from the Pacific Ocean. The spray is very thin—less than an inch per year—but it contains the nutrients from the Humboldt Current that feed the anchovetas that feed the cormorants. Other nutrients fall from the sky as dust or well up from groundwater. With next to no rainfall to wash away the residue, the deposits build up over time. The result: a layer of naturally deposited fertilizer four hundred miles long, twelve miles wide, and up to nine feet deep. It was eagerly exploited. Nitrates from Chile became a principal ingredient in packaged fertilizers—and, alas, bombs. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba has written in his history of nitrogen use, almost half the nitrates shipped to the United States were used to make explosives. In 1898 the British chemist William Crookes rang an alarm: the nitrogen would run out. Crookes was the new president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the group that had commissioned Liebig’s report. In his inaugural address, Crookes focused, quite literally, on Europe’s daily bread. The “bread-eaters of the world,” as he called them, were increasing by more than 6 million a year. To feed these new bread eaters, farmers either would have to expand into unused land or produce more from their existing land by fe...