Fritz Haber was a German chemist who, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, developed a method of creating ammonia

by combining hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen, and he figured out how to create it by using a metal

catalyst, a high temperature, and a large amount of pressure. This was an important discovery

because ammonia is a vital component of pressure. This was an important discovery because ammonia is a vital component of fertilizer.

Ammonia occurs naturally, in small quantities relatively, in decaying animal and vegetable matter,

in animal dump, in guano, and when these materials break down, they enrich the soil in which they lay, and that makes that

soil more suitable for growing crops. So being able to produce ammonia allows for the production

of this soil-enriching chemical that otherwise we can only really create by harvesting bat guano,

which is something that many cultures have done throughout history, and by using our fields as outhouses, essentially, which again is something

that many cultures have done for a very long time. Or we can also enrich our soil by stealing

large quantities of animal skeletons, which sounds like something that I just made up,

but this was actually a real concern before we knew how to artificially enrich soil.

A village would save up all of their cattle carcasses and bones and grind them up to be mixed in

with the soil. And sometimes another village would

come over and raid them and steal all of their bones to enrich their own soil instead. History is

pretty weird sometimes. But Haber's method allowed us to bypass those cumbersome approaches and get

right to the source. It allowed us to produce the chemicals

that resulted from all this guano and all of these skeletons. It allowed us to use science to bypass

the muck and to be able to stop using our fields anytime we need to go to the bathroom.

Haber's process was developed in a lab, which severely restricted

its output. But about five years after this process was perfected, a German chemist and engineer

named Carl Bosch came along and industrialized it, and he took what worked well in the lab,

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