What Haber achieved in the laboratory, Carl Bosch, the chief engineer of the German chemical giant BASF, refined into an industrial process capable of producing hundreds of tons of nitrogen in a factory the size of a small city, operated by more than fifty thousand workers. The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years.
