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

by Thomas Hager

The secret of successful farming is moving nitrogen around.

Saltpeter was a significant factor in favor of the British takeover of India.

These were the Chinchas Islands, a sprinkling of rocks six miles off the coast of Pisco, Peru, which constituted, in 1850, acre for acre, the most valuable real estate on earth. The value came from the ground the workers and the birds walked on: ten stories of guano, the world’s best fertilizer.

Innovation and discovery, research and development, fast-track marketing and sales, cutthroat global competition, cash stashed in hidden reserves: Brunck would have felt at home in any number of today’s big corporations.

Everything had to be rugged, leakproof, functional at high temperature and under enormous pressure.

He wanted a machine that combined the strength of a sumo wrestler, the speed of a sprinter, and the grace of a ballerina.

To survive they needed a strong king. To survive they needed to obey. Unfortunately, the man they obeyed, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was a madman. Or Europe’s most brilliant leader. Or delusional. Or the most glorious emperor in the history of Germany. It depended on whom you talked to, and when. In any case, it was clear to everyone who knew him that the absolute monarch of Europe’s most technologically advanced nation was, as England’s Lord Salisbury put it, “not quite normal.”

“It was always my view of life that it was only worth living if one developed all one’s abilities to reach the heights and experienced as much as possible of what a human life can offer,” she had written years before.

Clara Haber

TODAY HUNDREDS OF huge Haber-Bosch plants are drinking in air and turning out ammonia, producing enough fertilizer not only to support a burgeoning human population but to improve average diets worldwide.