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/sci/ - Science & Math

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8370339 No.8370339 [Reply] [Original]

Why doesn't he get more mention in textbooks if he's literally responsible for the quadrupling of agriculture productivity and the world population being so high?

Did his work with chemical weapons really offset the invention of a process to make ammonia from atmospheric Nitrogen? Like that's pretty huge all things considered I even think the number of people who would die of starvation if not for his fertilizers is more than the soldiers killed by his gas weapons, no?

"Nearly 80% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process."
Howarth, R. W. (2008). "Coastal nitrogen pollution: a review of sources and trends globally and regionally". Harmful Algae. 8: 14–20. doi:10.1016/j.hal.2008.08.015.

"The food production for half the world's current population depends on this method for producing nitrogen fertilizers."
Smil, Vaclav (2004). Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262693134

>> No.8370350

>>8370339
He does get mentioned, there was a whole section on the Haber process back when I did A-levels, with a few sidebars about his life.

>> No.8370564

>>8370339
I'm not a chemistry person, but even I remember learning about the Haber-Bosch process to extract nitrogen. But maybe that's because I'm from Austria and our education system wasn't as shit back then.

>> No.8370572

>>8370339
ironically, ammonia production caused more harm than all of his weapons research combined, by orders of magnitudes

>> No.8370618

>>8370572
explain

>> No.8370624

>>8370572
Impossible. The Haber-Bosch process literally turns air into fertilizer. Without it, food production would collapse dramatically.

>> No.8370833

>>8370618
Not him but ammonia is also used in the production of explosives.
Without the haber process, the ammonia starved Germans would have surrendered WWI a lot sooner meaning less loss of life for both sides.