Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1918

Fritz Haber

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1918 was awarded to Fritz Haber "for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements".

Fritz Haber received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1919. During the selection process in 1918, the Nobel Committee for Chemistry decided that none of the year's nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation's statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. Fritz Haber therefore received his Nobel Prize for 1918 one year later, in 1919.

In 1905 Fritz Haber (1868–1934) reached an objective long sought by chemists—that of fixing nitrogen from air. Using high pressure and a catalyst, he directly reacted nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas to create ammonia. The process was soon scaled up by BASF's great chemist and engineer Carl Bosch—hence the name "Haber-Bosch" process. The nitric acid produced from the ammonia was then used to manufacture agricultural fertilizers as well as explosives.
Haber was from a well-to-do German-Jewish family involved in various manufacturing enterprises. He studied at several German universities, earning a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1891. After a few years of moving from job to job, he settled into the Department of Chemical and Fuel Technology at the Polytechnic in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he mastered the new subject of physical chemistry. His research in physical chemistry eventually led to the Haber-Bosch process. In 1911 he was invited to become director of the Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at the new Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin, where academic scientists, government, and industry cooperated to promote original research.
The Haber-Bosch process is generally credited with keeping Germany supplied with fertilizers and munitions during World War I, after the British naval blockade cut off supplies of nitrates from Chile. During the war Haber threw his energies and those of his institute into further support for the German side. He developed a new weapon—poison gas, the first example of which was chlorine gas—and supervised its initial deployment on the Western Front at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915. His promotion of this frightening weapon precipitated the suicide of his wife, who was herself a chemist, and many others condemned him for his wartime role. There was great consternation when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.
After World War I, Haber was remarkably successful in building up his institute, but in 1933 the anti-Jewish decrees of the Nazi regime made his position untenable. He retired a broken man, although at the time of his death he was on his way to investigate a possible senior research position at Rehovot in Palestine (now Israel).

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