TECHNOLOGY × SUBSISTENCE

Bread From the Air

1908 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Plants starve for nitrogen amid an atmosphere that is nearly four-fifths nitrogen, locked in a molecule life can barely open. In 1908 Fritz Haber patented a way to force it: nitrogen and hydrogen pressed and heated over a catalyst into ammonia, which Carl Bosch and BASF scaled from bench to factory. Synthetic fertiliser followed, and with it the twentieth century's harvests; the world's growth from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to six billion by 2000 is judged impossible without it.

Why it matters

Roughly half the nitrogen in a modern human body has passed through a Haber-Bosch reactor: the process feeds continents, and has been judged more consequential for the modern world than the aeroplane, nuclear energy or spaceflight. The ledger has a dark side: the same chemistry armed explosives, Haber himself pioneered gas warfare, and the nitrogen let loose now overfertilises rivers and skies. Humanity eats, in every sense, from this reaction.

Dating & uncertainty

Haber filed his patent on the synthesis of ammonia from its elements on 13 October 1908; Bosch and BASF industrialised the process over the following years. The demographic claim sounds extravagant and is not: analysts of the nitrogen cycle conclude that the twentieth century's growth, from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to six billion at the century's end, would not have been possible without synthetic ammonia.

Sources

1. Erisman et al. (2008), Nature Geoscience · How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the worlddoi:10.1038/ngeo325
2. Smil (2001), MIT Press · Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the transformation of world food productiondoi:10.7551/mitpress/2767.001.0001
3. Vicente & Dean (2017), PNAS · Keeping the nitrogen-fixation dream alivedoi:10.1073/pnas.1701560114

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:2732.4 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day