Haber Bosch Process

Haber Process:-


Fritz Haber (left, 1.0 Nobel prizes in 1918) and Carl Bosch (right, 0.5 Nobels in 1931) have probably had a greater impact than anyone in the past 100 years, including Hitler, Gandhi, Einstein, etc.
Their Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century (e.g., V. Smil, Nature, July 29 1999, p 415) as it "detonated the population explosion," driving the world's population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.

The 70 million deaths of World War I and World War II almost vanish next to these numbers. But Haber, a patriotic German Jew, shared some responsibility for those as well: his work helped Germany to significantly prolong WW I, and also to develop the Zyklon B poison gas used in WW II's Holocaust. Haber's almost paradoxical biography affected more lives and deaths than anybody else's.

Bosch was a co-founder of IG-Farben, the world's largest chemical company. After WW II the allies broke it up into three smaller parts, each still larger than any foreign chemical company.


In the past 200 years only the germ theory of disease by Pasteur & Koch (1868-1876) had an impact on mankind that rivals the one of the Haber-Bosch process. 
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Haber-Bosch process: 
Under high temperatures and very high pressures, hydrogen and nitrogen (from thin air) are combined to produce ammonia.
Nearly one century after its invention, the process is still applied all over the world to produce 500 million tons of artificial fertilizer per year. 1% of the world's energy supply is used for it (Science 297(1654), Sep 2002); it still sustains roughly 40% of the population (M. D. Fryzuk, Nature 427, p 498, 5 Feb 2004). Billions of people would not even exist without it. And our dependence will only increase as the global count moves from six to ten billion people or so.