Fritz HaberBorn 9 Dec 1868; died 29 Jan 1934 at age 65. German physical chemist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1918) for his development of a method of synthesizing ammonia (1909) directly from nitrogen and hydrogen. This led to commercial large-scale production of nitrogen fertilizer. With the expertise of Carl Bosch, a chemist working at the Badische Anilin- und Soda- Fabrik (BASF), obstacles which hindered the large-scale adoption of the process were overcome and the Haber-Bosch process was born. The Haber-Bosch high pressure process followed in the 1920s. Haber was also responsible for introducing poison gases for chemical warfare in WW I. Being a Jew, he left Germany in 1933 to go into exile in Britain, working in Cambridge at the Cavendish Laboratory. |
