The Alchemy of Air Quotes

“SOUTH AMERICA’S GREAT Atacama Desert is a place unlike any other. Its climate is different, with close to zero rainfall but occasional thick fogs. Its plants and animals are different—what there are of them, which is to say almost none—capable of living with almost no water. Even its rocks are different. The floor of the Atacama is crusted and shot through with a riot of strange chemicals: nitrates, chromates, and dichromates; perchlorates, iodates, sulfates, and borates; chlorides of potassium, magnesium, and calcium; minerals “so extraordinary,” a researcher wrote, “were it not for their existence, geologists could easily conclude that such deposits could not form in nature.” How”
― 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

“A more personal way of gauging the impact of Haber-Bosch is to look at your own body. About half the nitrogen in you came out of a Haber-Bosch factory. Don’t worry: Nitrogen is nitrogen, the atoms in Haber-Bosch ammonia are precisely the same as the atoms in the best natural manure, and they all come, one way or another, from the air you breathe—but half the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.”
― 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

“The Nazis knew that their armed forces depended on gas from Leuna, so as the air attacks continued they gathered an army of 350,000 workers, including 7,000 engineers from the armed forces, all devoted to keeping the plant functioning.”
― 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

“Still, the demand for their products is so great that Haber-Bosch plants today consume 1 percent of all the energy on earth, and the largest factories produce so much ammonia that it has to be transported in pipelines (one of the first ammonia pipelines in the United States, built in the late 1960s, for instance, runs from the plant in Texas to the corn fields of Iowa). This huge, almost invisible industry is feeding the world. Without these plants, somewhere between two billion and three billion people—about 40 percent of the world’s population—would starve to death.”
― 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

“It was a gesture of resignation. It was becoming clear that the Nazis were going to win the elections, the other companies were already donating large sums, and it was time for Farben to smooth relations with the government in power. Perhaps, he hoped, Hitler would be more sensible than he appeared. Whatever happened, he was likely to be chancellor for at least a few more years. Bosch needed government money for Leuna. A few days after the meeting, Farben deposited four hundred thousand marks into a political fund. Almost all of it went to the Nazi Party.”
― 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

“There is no natural product that cannot, with perseverance, be manufactured.”
― 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

“empyrean”
― 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

“Lise Meitner”
― 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

“In the early 1920s, virtually every expert was predicting that the world was about to run out of oil.”
― 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

“It kept Germany in the war. Some historians have estimated that World War I would have ended a year, perhaps two years sooner, if Haber-Bosch had not been able to make the nitrates needed for explosives.”
― 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

“Once, a colleague remembered, Haber was walking backward in his office, practicing bowing his way out of an imperial audience, when he knocked over and broke an expensive vase.”
― 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

“IN 1897, AFTER more than a decade and a half of research and an investment of eighteen million gold marks—an amount by some estimates equal to the total value of BASF—Brunck’s chemists finally made synthetic indigo in bulk.”
― 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

“In the wake of the guano collapse, Peru needed money. It had floated enormous foreign loans on the promise of continued guano production; by the late 1860s Peru was one of the world’s largest debtor nations. It needed whatever it could make out of nitrates as quickly as possible.”
― 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

“The need was so great that in 1856 the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed any U.S. citizen to lay claim to any deserted guano island anywhere in the world and make it U.S. territory. The”
― 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

“About a third of the sale price of every ton of guano went into the treasury of Peru, a flow of income that by 1859 accounted for three-quarters of the nation’s national budget.”
― 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

“This was the highest-yield traditional agricultural system ever devised. Using it, the Chinese could feed as many as ten people with the output from each acre of farmland, a yield of food five to ten times higher than the European average of the 1800s.”
― 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

“The higher civilization rises, the viler man becomes.”
― 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

“their work was a way to understand the workings of the divine.”
― 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

“I would call that field of play--the place in which humans test their natural limits and often break them--science.”
― 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