Before this battle between Nernst and Haber there was a scientist named Wilhelm Ostwald.
He was a German scientist that was very successful. He made his own societies of scientists, had his own institute, and even was one of the founders of physical chemistry. He wasn’t very interested in the nitrate war and fertilizer, but he did much research on it. Germany got all of their fertilizer from Chile. He read up on the Boer war which was Germans and British against each other about African farmers against British soldiers. Ostwald feared that if this escalated even more the British would cut off the trading of nitrates to Germany because they could be used for explosives. This would put Germany at a food shortage starving their people and the German couldn’t make the gun powder they needed from the nitrates so they would be defenseless. Ostwald knew that Germany needed to find a new way to make artificial nitrates to make gunpowder and fertilizer. He knew the answer was in the nitrogen in the air he just had to get it somehow. Many scientists tried this before by burning the nitrogen out of the air with no prevail, but Ostwald wanted to do something different. He wanted to figure out a way to get the hydrogen gas to combine with the nitrogen in the air by itself to make the ammonia needed. Finally in 1900 he was able to get an appreciable amount of ammonia. He decided to sell it to chemical companies for one million marks. He want to leave Leipzig (the institute he worked at) and this was his chance also Nernst his former assistant got rich off science already he wanted to too. A company called BASF wanted to buy it, but first they sent one of their scientists to test it and found that the ammonia it was making was really just contaminants from the machine. He was humiliated, but this didn’t stop him. He decided to pull a philosopher's stone. He wanted to turn this nitrogen into ammonia like they wanted to turn lead into gold. There were complications because everyone that tried to turn lead into gold went crazy and were in poverty.
A scientists named Carl Engler recommended Haber a consulting contract with BASF to help him get more resources for his nitrogen research.
Carl Engler
He didn’t really like Haber all that much, but thought the work he was doing could have potential. Haber needed money. He started to raise the pressure higher which lowered the temperature on his experiments and was getting better results in ammonia production than Nernst and Ostwald. He not only worked with pressure and temperature he also used catalysts to produce higher yields. He began making ten times the amount of ammonia from air than Nernst could. As of BASF Heinrich von Brunck who was the head at the time was a high gambler so Haber knew he would gamble on his project. His first gamble was on the synthetic indigo dye industry which turned BASF into a chemical powerhouse.
I thought it was cool that Wilhelm Ostwald pretty much founded his own branch of chemistry he worked in. It was weird though that Ostwald didn’t really want to work with fertilizer and the nitrate war, but felt the need he had to. It also seems weird he didn’t want to work with Fritz Haber, but again thought he kind of had to. It almost seems like a pattern of him feeling the need to do something, but not really wanting to do it in the first place.
ReplyDeleteIt is unbelievable how much somewhere, like Germany as you mentioned, relies so heavily on one type of molecule for many resources. Their insufficient amount of nitrates caused issues with their fertilizer supply, which damaged their agriculture production, and their gunpowder, which created weaker forces in wars. Despite Ostwald's failure in combining hydrogen gas and nitrogen to make ammonia, Carl Engler was able to learn from the mistakes of many scientists before him and yield the desired ammonia. The mistakes are what pave the way toward the goal in the end and it is amazing to see the progression of the trials that occur along the way.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to learn the histories of scientists that we have heard about in our own chemistry class. I also thought it was also interesting that a lot of discoveries are found upon war just like Ostwald's discoveries. I guess War is a way for scientific research to expand because of all the competition.
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