Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist of Jewish origin who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development of the Haber process, which was the first industrially perfected method of synthesizing Ammonia from Nitrogen and Hydrogen gasses. This invention was of importance to the synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. The food production for half the world's current population depends on this method for producing fertilizer. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.
Carl Bosch (27 August 1874 – 26 April 1940) was a German chemist and engineer and Nobel laureate in chemistry. He was a pioneer in the field of high-pressure industrial chemistry and founder of IG Farben, at one point the world's largest chemical company.
(Synthetic Ammonia) The Haber process, also called the Haber–Bosch process, is the industrial implementation of the reaction of nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. It is the main industrial procedure to produce ammonia.
Nitrogen is a strong limiting nutrient in plant growth. Carbon and oxygen are also critical, but are easily obtained by plants from soil and air. Even though air is 78% nitrogen, atmospheric nitrogen is nutritionally unavailable because nitrogen molecules are held together by strong triple bonds. Nitrogen must be 'fixed', i.e. converted into some bioavailable form, through natural or man-made processes. It was not until the early 20th century that Fritz Haber developed the first practical process to convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia, which is nutritionally available. Prior to the discovery of the Haber process, ammonia had been difficult to produce on an industrial scale. Nitrogen fixation was already being done on an industrial scale using the Birkeland–Eyde process, but this is very energy-inefficient.
Fertilizer generated from ammonia produced by the Haber process is estimated to be responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population. It is estimated that half of the protein within human beings is made of nitrogen that was originally fixed by this process; the remainder was produced by nitrogen fixing bacteria and archaea.
