The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler by Thomas Hager

The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler Reviews

• 
  Michael

  The Alchemy of Air is brilliant science writing, which means that it reads more like a bracing adventure story than a science lecture.
  
  At the turn of the 20th century, an impending crisis faces the world: mass starvation. The earth simply can't yield enough food to keep up. The only men that can save the world are chemists tasked with the impossible: distilling nitrogen from the air.
  
  Thomas Hager's writing pulses with intrigue and sweeps us away into a cast of characters that includes manure tycoons, South American swashbucklers, and German power-chemists. And it takes you into the most unexpected settings: Chilean guana fields and city-sized factories, to name a couple.
  
  It's stunning to think that this story was always right in front of our noses, but Alchemy of Air demonstrates how a great writer can reveal a hidden world in our midst. What's just as impressive is that you end up absorbing a perplexing amount of science (particularly chemistry) without even realizing it. Alchemy of Air is a dazzling feat of story telling--put it on your must-read list.
  
• 
  Tony

  Guano, though no saint, works many miracles.
  
  So goes a local Peruvian proverb. Almost a haiku. It's how I like my wisdom served. Yes, thank you, I'll have a Malbec and an order of the Cryptic Guano, please.
  
  Guano, or Birdpoop, as we call it here. There was a time when it was the most prized resource on the planet. Liquid gold. Well, sort of liquid. But golden enough that nations went to war over it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
  
  This is a brilliant book and I can't introduce it to you any better than the author himself:
  
  This is the story of two men who invented a way to turn air into bread, built factories the size of small cities, made enormous fortunes, helped engineer the deaths of millions of people, and saved the lives of billions more.
  
  Perhaps more impressive, the author explains all this in a page-turning way made understandable even to someone like me who barely escaped college biology. But I have grown some pretty nice tomatoes.
  
  Farmers, even those with a casual 18'x 18' plot like me, have long known the value of crop rotation, select fall crops, and manure. And what is manure but nitrogen.* More nitrogen, better yield. But even with all those methods, fields became played out. Malthusian doomsayers did some rough math between food and people and predicted we were headed for mass starvation.
  
  So, how to get more nitrogen to the crops. Well, there was naturally forming saltpeter. For example, in the mud flats of the Ganges River. That's why Britain decided it best to take over India.
  
  But other countries had the same needs. Which is where birdpoop comes in. There were islands just off the west coast of South America that were covered in bird guano. Soon, mountains of the shit were being unloaded in European ports. The United States even passed legislation - The Guano Islands Act - which allowed any U.S. citizen to lay claim to any deserted island anywhere in the world and make it U.S. territory. Of course, in that great American tradition, islands were claimed that had no guano and were not deserted. Midway Island, Baker, Johnston, Howland and other islands and atolls were all acquired under the Guano Islands Act, which, by the way, is still in effect.
  
  Eventually, after a few wars and such, the birdpoop was all gone. So, too, was the nitrate-rich mineral layer found in South America's Great Atacama Desert. Wars were fought here, too - The Nitrate Wars - and is the reason that Bolivia is now land-locked.**
  
  Nitrogen, that essential element, is not only in mud flats, deserts and bird droppings***, it's also in the air. Nitrogen gas makes up 80% of the Earth's atmosphere. We breathe it in and out all day. The problem is, the nitrogen in the air is inert and can't be used to fertilize. It's like being on a boat in the ocean and still unable to get a drink of water.
  
  So, taking a deep breath, this book is about the two men who managed to take the nitrogen from the air and make it usable. And make it usable they did.
  
  Fritz Haber was able to turn nitrogen in the air into ammonia. Carl Bosch made it work at the industrial level. The world has plenty of food now thanks to these two men.****
  
  It was Haber, though, who personally drifted a Chlorine fog over Allied troops in WWI. And it was Bosch who went on to manufacture synthetic gas and rubber, without which Hitler would have been out of business in eight months. Too, it was Haber, a Jew, whose research into chemical insecticides was further developed by other researchers into a poison gas called Zyklon B.
  
  Also covered here, if rather quickly, is the deleterious effect of all that fertilizer on the environment. The true understanding of that remains inchoate.
  
  I highly recommend this book.*****
  
  _______________________________
  *I love rhododendrons, but for years I thought rhododendrons didn't love me. Oh, I put all that acidy stuff around them but the leaves yellowed and browned and soon I was replacing a withered bush. I always had wood chips around the rhododendron beds, mushroom manure around the flower beds. Then I learned that in their first year, wood chips suck the nitrogen right out of the soil. Well, I planted a delphinium in an open spot in the rhododendron bed and it refused to grow. I moved it to the flower bed, away from the wood chips, and it immediately thrived. So, last year I did not put wood chips in the rhododendron beds, using the mushroom manure instead. And my rhodys are smiling.
  
  **An interesting historical parallel popped up to me reading this part of the story. The nitrate fields in that desert were in parts of Peru, Chile and Bolivia. The richest section was located in Peru, but the Chileans were the better miners. So Peru let the Chileans in and they dominated the population in that area. Eventually, a misguided Peruvian dictator decided to raise taxes on the Chileans, who protested to Chile, which came in and kicked the Peruvian ass. Sound familiar to Hitler's pretext for coming to the aid of put-upon Germans in Czechoslovakia?
  
  ***There are posts on my deck which are usually covered white with birdshit by late spring. I'll let you know how my agricultural experiments go next year.
  
  ****Yes, there is still starvation, the author states, but because of war, natural disasters, politics, not because there isn't enough food.
  
  *****A huge thank you to GR friend Tippy Jackson, an actual scientist, who recommended this book to me.
• 
  Clif Hostetler

  It's surprising how interesting a book about fertilizer can be. More specifically, this book tells the story of the Haber-Bosch process used to manufacture synthetic nitrogen fertilizer by turning atmospheric nitrogen into a form that can be used by plant life. If you believe this to be not very important consider this; nearly 80% of the nitrogen found inside your body—and every other living body in the world—originated from the Haber-Bosch process. It's true, from half to one third of the people alive today simply wouldn't be here if it weren't for synthetic fertilizers because there wouldn't be enough food—even if everybody ate low on the food chain (i.e no meat).
  
  But there's another side to the Haber-Bosch process. It allowed World War I to last about two years longer than it would have otherwise because it can also be used to make gun powder and explosives. Germany had no access to the raw materials needed to make more explosives without the Haber-Bosch process and without it they simply would have exhausted their supplies. Then later in World War II technologies similar to the Haber-Bosch process allowed Germany to make gasoline from coal. Since Germany had limited access to alternative sources it's hard to imagine how they could have fueled their mechanized army otherwise.
  
  This book also contains an interesting human interest story about the chemist Fritz Haber and engineer Carl Bosch as their careers first received international praise and recognition only to die later as broken men. Fritz Haber was awarded the Nobel prize in 1918 for development of the chemical process, and Carl Bosch was awarded the Nobel prize in 1931 for overcoming the engineering problems posed by the large-scale, continuous-flow, high-pressure technology.
  
  Fritz Haber's story is particularly tragic since he was Jewish. Up until the time of Hitler, Haber was an ultra German patriot, and even converted to Christianity in an effort to make himself 100% German. He was an enthusiastic proponent of the use of poison gas during World War I. He found himself to be a man without a country when the Nazis took over. He died a broken man in 1934 in Switzerland.
  
  Carl Bosch was an engineer and business man first and tended to be disrespectful of Nazi politics. The IG Farben Board promoted him to a powerless position to keep him out of public—and Nazi—view. He began to drink excessively, his health began to fail, and he lost interest in living. Before he died in 1940 he confided to his son that he foresaw the destruction of Germany.
  
  There's also an ecological side to this story. Since the agricultural use of nitrogen is generally less that 50% efficient, the use of nitrogen has loaded the world's environment with fixed nitrogen beyond its natural state and has disrupted biological habitats with excessive nutrients leading to algae blooms and eutrophication of lakes.
• 
  Max

  Hager gives us a compelling history of two men we might not be familiar with: Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. By the end we know these men were very important. Their accomplishments changed the world.
  
  In 1898 British Academy of Sciences President Sir William Crookes announced that the world faced a crisis. In decades mass starvation would prevail as natural fertilizer stocks were exhausted. The infusion of South American guano in the 1840’s had dramatically increased farm yields. Upon their depletion nitrates from the Chilean desert starting in the 1870’s kept farm yields up. These fertilizers along with improved sanitation and antiseptic medicine were rapidly increasing world population. The population was more urban and eating more meat. Fewer farmers had to produce more. The nitrates were also being used to make explosives.
  
  In 1907 in Germany, Fritz Haber developed a process to make ammonia from air. Ammonia is easily converted into fertilizer or explosives. Ammonia consists of nitrogen and hydrogen. Nitrogen in the air is in a tightly bound molecule (N2) unusable by the human body and many of our important crops. Nitrogen is in every cell in our body. Combining N2 with hydrogen to make ammonia creates fixed nitrogen, nitrogen our bodies and crops can use. Natural fertilizers are formed by bacteria that fix nitrogen.
  
  Haber’s process worked but didn’t scale to the size needed for commercial profitability. The successful dye maker BASF had mastered large scale processes and was looking for a new product to ensure its future. BASF reached a deal with Haber. But it was their young brilliant engineer Carl Bosch who relentlessly solved problem after problem that brought the project to fruition. Haber’s rare metal catalyst had to be replaced with something cheaper. Pure hydrogen had to be produced cheaply. Containment vessels that could contain high temperatures and pressures twenty times that of a steam locomotive boiler had to be built. And the process had to run 24/7 continuously. Bosch assembled a huge team to develop the new catalyst, super strong containment vessels and myriad new technologies and by 1911 could produce tons of ammonia a day. The Haber-Bosch system was born. In 1913 he completed a new factory in Oppau that produced tons per hour and huge profits rolled in.
  
  In 1914, WWI began. The envisioned quick German victory soon evaporated. The British Navy cut off Germany’s access to Chilean nitrates. The BASF plant became critical to the German war effort as a source of explosives first and foremost and fertilizer second. But the plant in Oppau was on the west side of the Rhine and on May 27, 1915 was targeted by French planes in the first aerial industrial bombing of the war. Though the canvas and wood planes and small bombs were primitive, lucky hits could disable the plant.
  
  Bosch, now in charge at BASF, made a lucrative deal with the German government to build a huge plant tucked well inside Germany at Leuna. The new plant would convert the ammonia it produced into nitrate for explosives. It opened in April 1917 and by the end of the war was producing 160,000 tons per year all of which went to the German military. The plant was essentially a single integrated machine two miles long and a mile wide. The Leuna plant may well have extended the war for a year.
  
  Haber, long divorced from active involvement with BASF, turned militaristic. He had achieved prominence leading the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. Haber was a Jew who had converted to Christianity for social acceptability and career advancement. Even so in Germany he was still considered a Jew and second class citizen. This may have added to his desire to prove himself a German patriot. He became a science advisor to Kaiser Wilhelm. He immediately began working on poison gas. He took responsibility not only for making it but its initial deployment. Kaiser Wilhelm gave him the Iron Cross after the first successful use in battle.
  
  The aftermath of the war challenged Bosch and BASF in new ways. Now primarily a nitrate company rather than a dye company, its secret processes were eyed by the world. Its Oppau plant was occupied by the French. Bosch agreed to help France build a plant in order to be allowed to operate his business in Germany freely. Soon the British got plans. The Haber-Bosch system secret was out. Bosch also faced labor unrest from trade unionists and leftist groups. However the great German inflation helped. The large debt the company incurred to the German government to build the Leuna plant was quickly repaid. Similarly the favorable exchange rate fed profits from substantial foreign sales. In a few years BASF was humming.
  
  After the war Haber was investigated as a war criminal but not prosecuted. He returned to run his chemistry institute with his scientific standing intact. In Germany he was a hero. Despite misgivings about his poison gas work, in 1920 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his development of synthesizing ammonia. Haber, still the super patriot, continued to help the military and began looking for ways to help Germany pay off its reparations. He subsequently spent years trying to figure out how to extract gold from sea water. Unfortunately all he proved was that prior estimates greatly exaggerated the tiny amount of gold in sea water.
  
  Bosch next turned his eyes on synthetic gasoline production. Realizing the rest of the world would soon be competing in the synthetic fertilizer business, Bosch wanted the next big idea. Making gasoline from coal was extremely complicated and expensive, but it was the type of challenge Bosch embraced and he took it on. The investment required was huge. BASF couldn’t do it alone. He got other German companies to merge with BASF creating the largest chemical company in the world, IG Farben, which he ran. Bosch also wanted international partners to invest in the project and also to remove the stigma of IG Farben as a German company. By 1929 he had some agreements most notably with Standard Oil which shared Bosch’s feeling that the world oil supply was limited and declining. But what would prove to be a huge oil strike in Oklahoma had just been made. Soon oil would be much cheaper than synthetic fuel could be manufactured. Then came the stock market crash followed by the depression.
  
  Amidst the cascading bad news, Bosch did win the Nobel Prize in 1931 for his industrial application of Haber’s discovery. But in 1933 a new dangerous development took place. Hitler became chancellor. Bosch was concerned, Haber was in shock. Hitler quickly declared Jews could not work in government positions. Hitler’s edict was not about religion but race. Thus Haber himself would be included except for his preeminent status. He resigned anyway. Jews, who made up a disproportionately large segment of the German scientific community, began leaving Germany in droves. This concerned many other German scientists such as Max Planck who approached Hitler and found him uncompromising.
  
  Haber moved to Cambridge. His health was failing and he was distraught over what had become of Germany and his lifetime of trying to be accepted as a true German. He was also remorseful over the outcome of his personal life which included two failed marriages. Chaim Weizmann talked him into moving to Palestine. Sadly he only made it to Switzerland before his heart condition worsened and he died in 1934.
  
  Bosch was torn. He didn’t like Hitler and he had many Jewish associates on his staff who were important to him. But he saw reality and he saw that the Nazis were very interested in synthetic fuel and synthetic rubber to boot. The Nazi government and IG Farben signed a deal financing the expansion of the Leuna plant. While he found the Nazis repugnant Bosch put business ahead of principle. But in spite of Nazi disapproval in 1935 Bosch with an entourage of old BASF cohorts attended a Max Planck organized memorial for Haber a year following his death. Fearing Bosch would continue to antagonize the Nazis, the IG Farben board kicked Bosch upstairs to a position managing the board but without any operational responsibility. Any remaining Jews or undesirables were ousted or left and IG Farben became one with the Nazi government. Sidelined, Bosch turned to alcohol and suffered from depression. Bosch envisioned only disaster for Germany as it started WWII. He died in April 1940.
  
  The Leuna plant was the target for 22 massive allied bombing raids in the war. The 18,000 tons of explosive they dropped on it were the equal of the Hiroshima bomb. The plant was heavily fortified and well defended by the Germans. Allied bomber losses were heavy. The raids diminished the plant’s output, but it still was producing some gas at war’s end. Albert Speer said after the war that if the plant had been taken out entirely, the war would have ended eight weeks later.
  
  The Haber-Bosch process is still vital today. While greatly modernized, today’s plants work on the same principle and use the same catalyst. In 1972 the first deal China made following Nixon’s opening in 1972 was to order thirteen modern Haber-Bosch fixed nitrogen plants. It was the biggest deal the Chinese communist government had made since it began. Chinese starvation and malnutrition receded into the past. Today China is the world’s largest synthetic fertilizer producer and consumer. Hundreds of huge Haber-Bosch plants around the world are operating. Numerous large pipelines carry their ammonia to market. So endemic is synthetically fixed nitrogen that today half of the nitrogen in our bodies comes from a Haber-Bosch plant.
  
• 
  Catherine Read

  This was such a fascinating book. I loved the history lesson on how physical chemists in Germany learned to fix nitrogen and supply the world with enough fertilizer to feed the growing masses worldwide. The latter part of the book was about what I call "The Law of Unintended Consequences." Fritz Haber discovered how to create ammonia out of air just before WWI. Carl Bosch engineered the process on a large scale to produce ammonia out of air and convert it into fixed nitrogen fertilizer. Between the two of these German scientists, they also fueled Hitler's war against the rest of Europe in the 1930s. The legacy of the Haber-Bosch system lives on today. The last part of the book talks about the impact on our global environment and the unintended consequences of these scientific discoveries. I highly recommend it. Very informative and well told.
• 
  Betsy

  A fascinating history of fixed nitrogen and the complex of related chemicals that provide us with fertilizer and explosives, and the two Nobel prize winning scientists who developed the process which enabled us to produce these substances in substantial amounts. Well written, focusing on the difficulties that first Fritz Haber, then Carl Bosch, faced in producing ammonia, which could then be used to produce other nitrogen compounds, out of thin air, as it were. This is an enjoyable narrative, almost fiction like, but obviously well researched, that brings to life a specific period in the early 20th century. The author makes the two scientists very human, exposing not just their genius and persistence, but also their personalities and foibles. They accomplished an amazing feat and received quite a bit of deserved recognition during their lives, but both also died somewhat disillusioned and diminished. Their great accomplishment made it possible for our limited earth to grow enough food to feed more than ten times the world's population as of the date they started, but it also enable two world wars and untold suffering.
  
  The author does not get into the weeds on the chemical properties and processes involved but instead described them in just enough detail for it to make sense to the non chemist. The author does not apologize for this lack; he knows he's writing for the lay person. As a lay person, however, I would like to have seen a little bit more detail. Enough that I could understand better why it was such an monumental achievement. Also, the author only briefly, in the last chapter, touches on the long term negative consequences of the development of synthetic fertilizers.
  
  However, it was a very enjoyable, engrossing read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in science history.
• 
  Dov Zeller

  The Washington Post starts off its review of this book: "Somehow fertilizer seems an unlikely subject for a Faustian tale about pride, vanity and ambition. Yet here it is..."
  
  
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
  
  By Faustian, I suppose Hager means the two main biographical characters, Bosch and Haber, "sold their soul" to "the devil." I find myself not entirely comfortable with this framing/analogy, though I can't quite focus in on why I find it unsuitable.
  
  The ambition and focus of Bosch and Haber were immense and their contributions to science and industry, monumental. I don't know that I agree that they were precisely, as Hager says, "brought low by their own, very human failings". But certainly they made wings with the fevered, perhaps monomanaical passion of Daedalus and flew high in a mythological sense, like Icarus and, like Icarus, were brought low. Is there some connection here between Icarus and Daedalus and Faust? Hmmm.
  
  But the fates of Bosch and Haber were caught up in currents of history whose powers and complexity were greater than even they, insightful as they were, could have imagined (though Bosch to some degree, as he lost all hope around the start of World War II, predicted Germany's self-destruction). Their stories are tangled up with history in a way that makes them something other than actors in their own, tragic odyssey...
  
  This book takes an important and wonderful look at global relationships around trade, politics and resources, starting before WWI and takes us through WWII and beyond. It's a bit of an epic sweep, though the broad scope at the beginning in many ways narrows as the book moves forward. It's an incredible story that begins with an island of shit. We have 1) A world in need of food, and nutrient-rich (Nitrogen rich) soil in which to grow food. 2) An island layered with guano that provides just enough fertilizer to demonstrate how much more fertilizer will be needed to sustain world populations. 3) The discovery of the interchangeability of explosives and fertilizer. 4) The race to produce synthetic nitrogen for fertilizer and the terrifying (and wondrous?) evolution of the modern day chemical factory. 5) Not to mention the drama of Jewish scientists in Germany before WWII--in this case focusing on Haber, a scientist who goes to great lengths to become an 'assimilated' German (including converting to Christianity) whose efforts to assimilate and whose notorious patriotism in the first world war alienate a larger world community and in no way protect him from persecution by the Nazis.
  
  These two men, together, led Germany to a height of industrial powe, only to be brought low by the horrors of the Nazi regime.
  
  Hager (the writer of the Washington Post review, not to be confused with Haber, the scientist whose life is explored in the book) seems to think both men, Haber and Bosch, "deserve" or at least "walked into" their fate.
  
  "But when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, things changed. Haber suddenly understood that he would always be Jewish and that the terrible bargains he had made would bring him nothing but contempt and ostracism. Bosch, heartsick at the prospect of firing large numbers of his Jewish employees in a Nazi purge, sought an exception in a personal interview with Hitler, only to endure an anti-Semitic tirade. He realized that the immense industrial enterprise to which he had dedicated his life had been placed at the service of a monster.
  
  "Yet neither man is to be pitied, for both made their choices freely. Inventing fertilizer may have helped mankind, but it also launched their careers, and both took advantage. At the beginning of World War I, Bosch volunteered to convert his entire operation to the manufacture of explosives, fertilizer's chemical first cousin. The government subsidized the biggest munitions plant in the world and built it partly with slave labor. Haber, also eager to please, joined the war ministry, donned a captain's uniform, developed a method of blanketing enemy trenches with poisonous chlorine gas and oversaw its first successful demonstration at Ypres in 1915."
  
  I don't know that "free choice" is a meaningful category in this situation. I think it is fine to have complicated feelings about these men. To criticize and also to have compassion, for neither meant to help build the machinery of genocide.
  
  It is interesting to think how Haber's drive to become "German" might have led him to be much more aggressive in terms of creating weapons for the German war effort during WWI. His need to prove himself as "authentically" German led him to be nationalistic in a way we could, in hindsight, criticize. But his advocating for the use of chemical weapons during WWI was not a form of malice or a wish to destroy other nations. He hoped the presence of these weapons would stop the fighting and actually save lives on all sides. In any case, any engagement with the progress of technology could be framed as Faustian because no technology is exactly innocent just as no technology is exactly guilty. Evolution has required an arms race and it has gotten one, and as dreadful as it is, it also seems to be part of the waters in which we swim (and which we, sadly, can't seem to stop ourselves from damning.)
  
  In any case, this is a fine book and there are several great reviews on GR (much better than this.) So if this review doesn't convince you, perhaps try a few more?
  
  Hager comments that the book is too short, and could easily have been twice as long. Maybe "The Alchemy of Air" will inspire some kind of sequel, or at least more writing about Bosch, which Hager says is quite lacking.
  
  
• 
  Jim Angstadt

  The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
  Thomas Hager (Goodreads Author)
  
  I never thought fertilizer could be so interesting.
  
  The author briefly covers some of fertilizer's history. In more detail he describes the value and harvesting of bird guano, and then the nitrates of the Atacama.
  
  However, most of the book is about the manufacturing of synthetic fertilizer. There are surprisingly interesting descriptions of the chemical, metallurgical, organizational, and financial challenges that had to be met for synthetic fertilizer to be competitive.
  
  Most of this engineering effort took place in Germany, by a large German manufacturing company. Then came WWII. Many of the leading scientists in the field were Jewish. Under pressure, many fled, and their knowledge and talents left Germany.
  
  Today we enjoy the benefits of their pioneering efforts, without even realizing the enormous difficulties that had to be overcome.
  
• 
  Meia Alsup

  Favorite book of 2020 thus far. I couldn't put this down.
  
  An incredibly insightful look into the history of Haber Bosch process, and the implications of Haber and Bosch's independent work and discoveries.
  
  Extremely thought-provoking with respect to scientific discovery, the role of government, and where and how advancement and creativity flourishes.
• 
  Nancy Mills

  Who knew fertilizer could be so interesting? This book is about the chemistry and history of fertilizer, including the discovery of saltpeter and then the geniuses who figured out how to pull nitrogen out of the air and efficiently apply it to get vastly higher yields from fields, thus feeding the world. The author weaves this science and engineering with the biographies of these 2 brilliant Germans, a scientist and an engineer, along with the history of the time spanning pre-WWI through WW2. Unsurprisingly, their situations went from patriotic Germans eager to support their country to angst over their roles in furthering Hitler's deadly agenda. These 2 were interesting characters, one being a Jew with a keen desire to be accepted as a valuable member of German society, the other an engineer who lived and breathed his work and dreamed of it benefitting the world. WWII is rough on these guys.
  Very well written. I couldn't put it down.
  
• 
  Josh Friedlander

  The core of this story is summarised in about a page and a half in
  The Wizard and the Prophet: the process that makes nitrate fertilizer from the nitrogen in air is possibly the most significant invention of all time, measured in billions of lives saved from starvation, and in its world-historical enabling of German aggression in both world wars. Instead of belabouring it, Hager uses the rest of the book to tell a lot of broader, only slightly related stories, beginning with the
  War of the Pacific (Chile's ignoble takeover of lucrative guano islands), and stretching to the afterlife of both Haber and Bosch, the role of IG Farben in Nazi warcrimes, and a bit about the Green Revolution and nitrogen runoff creating "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico.
  
  The
  long subtitle tries to cast it as piece of German-Jewish history à la
  Gold and Iron or
  The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933. It isn't really. But it is a well-written history of technology, looking equally at engineers racing to get a product to market and at the politics of global supply chains (hence the first naval battle of WWI was off the coast of Chile). No doubt one day historians will write global histories of modern tech giants, with supply chains from Cambodia to China to Silicon Valley, and the weight they exert on our political economy.
• 
  Lisa Ard

  Call it "sensational science" - a great story about (of all things) fixing nitrogen from the air, which involves slavery, U.S. land annexation, a Jewish scientist, WWI poison gas, BASF, the rise of Hitler....easy to read non-fiction and too fascinating to put down!
• 
  David

  I read this book at the insistence of my father, as I (perhaps in a bit of snobbery) thought a book about fertilizer would be extraordinarily dull. I could not have been more wrong. Written by a relatively unknown author of scientific books, the prose is eminently readable and elegant, and the story of the development of the Haber-Bosch process which has solved Thomas Malthus' and Sir William Crooke's (to name two of many) prognostication of mass starvation due to the lack of something that is all around us, but largely unusable: N2. I had no idea the importance of fixed nitrogen, nor its scarcity and immense value before reading this book, and have to admit I am more than a little disturbed at how chemists have managed to become "alchemists of the air" and altered the very nature of life on earth and the biosphere thanks to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch's intense labored. Were it not for this process and its ability to convert N2 into NH3 and then fertilizer (or munitions), the Earth, if all available arable land were under cultivation with the best agricultural practices would only be able to support 4 billion people. That is far less than the current population of the world today, and a testament to the importance of the Haber-Bosch process, considering a great amount of arable land is either paved over or simply mismanaged. The implications and potential ramifications of the Haber-Bosch process are astounding. How had this book not become a New York Times bestseller?
• 
  Charles Shapiro

  The synopsis in Goodreads covers the general course of the book, but puts more emphasis on the final outcome than the process, which does not reflect the relative focus of the book. This book does an excellent job of explaining the need for nitrogen fertilizers, the history of the commercial trade, and just how difficult is was to develop the process to convert nitrogen gas to ammonia. Some of the science is slightly off the mark, but is not critical to the story.
  
  What was left out of the review was the role that the Nazis had in the story, the twisted relationship Huber had with Judaism, and how most of the German scientific community abandoned their Jewish colleagues when Hitler made his intentions known.
  
  This is an excellent book which tells the story of an amazing scientific advance, the role of business in the success of this development, and the unintended consequences.
  
  I may be biased since I have spent most of my career trying to make crop use of nitrogen more efficient.
• 
  Doris

  The story of how to extract nitrogen from the air, leading to the development of artificial fertilizer as well as to explosives. The process developed also made possible artificial gas derived from coal. The focus is on the two main players: Fritz Haber, who got the process of extracting nitrogen to the point here it was commercially viable, and Carl Bosch, who scaled it up to industrial levels. Both would go on to collect Nobel Prizes; both would be severely disillusioned by the Nazi regime.
  
  The story moved along at a brisk clip, and I learned more than I would ever have expected to about agriculture! The chemistry was frequently over my head, although I understood the gist.
  
  I enjoyed this very much more than I had expected to.
• 
  Prasanna

  A fascinating back-story of the pre-eminent position nitrates held in human lives and how a chemical process averted genocide by starvation for the human race, and lets the present civilisation live way beyond the means of "organic" production.
  Also engrossing is the story of inventors Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber and their different paths and contributions to modern science and society, and of course the jewish-nazi conflict. A very good book because it draws a parallel between an earlier crisis that was bested by human ingenuity and the as yet unknown fate that will befall society after its stand-off with climate change.
• 
  Jan

  I learned so much from this book--about chemistry and history and humans who aim to do good but whose efforts turn out to result in both good and unspeakable evil. Hager tells a very important story engagingly, unblinkingly. And he follows the story with an epilogue that suggests we have larger concerns than simple 'global warming.' Our fertilizer--something that is used for good--is possibly doing the most damage of all to our environment even while it's feeding the world. I will be thinking about this book and recommending it for a long time to come.
• 
  Charlie

  An excellently written story about two tragic scientists who discovery of how to extract nitrogen from the atmosphere fed billions and killed millions.
  
  After explaining the important role nitrogen plays as a fertilizer and as an explosive, The Alchemy of Air then traces the history of the two tragic German scientists (Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch) who discovered a process that allowed nitrogen to be pulled from of air.
  
  A great read!
• 
  Timothy Boyd

  I love reading history but I love it even more when I can find a history book that is about a subject I have never learned about before. I got a pleasant surprise with this book. Not only was it about a topic I have never studied before, I have never even heard about this history topic! Exceptionally well written and organized. A much enjoyed read. Highly recommended
• 
  Tugrul Tekbulut

  Bu kitabı Pan yayıncılık tarafından Havadaki Simya adıyla yayınlanan Türkçe çevirisinden okudum.
  
  Yaşamı oluşturan iki element döngüsünden biri olan azot döngüsünün, havadaki azotun yaklaşık 100 yıl önce İki tutkulu ve çok çalışkan bilim / işadamının çabalarıyla Amon yaka çevrilebilmesinin hikayesini çok güzel akıcı sade bir dille anlatıyor.
  
  
  Sonunda bugün ulaşmış olduğumuz refah seviyesinin ama bunun yanında yaşadığımız obezite çevre kirliliği gibi bir çok güncel sorunun bu tarihi buluşun doğrudan ve dolaylı etkileri olduğunu farkına varıyoruz.
  Muhteşem bir inceleme. bir çok farklı konunun ortak yanını ortaya koyuyor ve kolay okunuyor. Türkçe çevirisi de kusursuz.
• 
  Kyle Anderson

  This was destined to be a 4star read from the moment I found it in a now forgotten goodreads list. The subject plays right into my interests and the author only had ground to lose but thankfully did not disappoint in the slightest. Fascinating how something as innocuous as nitrogen which makes up 79% of air, once chemically mastered totally reshaped the course of the 20th century, first feeding men, then killing them.
• 
  Brahm

  A well-written and page-turning history of the Haber-Bosch process: pulling nitrogen out of the atmosphere and transforming it into ammonia for fertilizer - or explosives. Hager balances biography, science, industry and politics in an engaging and exiting narrative.
  
  I'm flip-flopping between 4 and 5 stars.
• 
  Katie Roberts

  Fascinating timeline of the science interspersed with World War I / II history. Wraps it up well with the impact these scientific discoveries have had on people and the environment. Never thought I’d get emotionally involved with the story of fertilizer!
• 
  Evan Wondrasek

  I jumped into this book immediately after another one of Thomas Hager's books,
  Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine. This book had crazy positive reviews and seemed like a no-brainer to check out, although I wasn't sure how artificial nitrogen fixation could fill a whole book.
  
  Well, it turns out that artificial nitrogen fixation via the Haber-Bosch process is fascinating and is basically the only reason that our planet is able to feed our current population levels. Without it, we'd have been facing food shortages long ago and mass starvation would have been normal on a global scale. I learned that on average, about 50% of the nitrogen in our bodies is "synthetic" (not that it matters - nitrogen is nitrogen), and that the same processes that produce fertilizers for our crops are pretty darn good at becoming the explosives that were later used in WWI and WWII.
  
  This book was deeply researched and well written. It was very much a history book, covering the complex lives of Haber and Bosch, how they were both persecuted for being Jewish and also how they were involved in the complex politics of pre- and post- WWI/WWII Germany. (And although it didn't talk about this directly, it sure made me appreciate how the economic beatdown that was imposed on Germany after WWI supported the rise of the Nazis and much of the basis for WWII.) Both individuals were complex and flawed and I loved that this book told an honest story about them - both their successes and their failures - rather than doing the whole hagiographic thing that so many biographies do.
  
  This book also made me vividly remember a time, something like 10 years ago, when I was visiting my elderly great-uncle. My father was a farmer and worked for my great-uncle, and my great-uncle led the family farming business for almost his entire life. Outside of farming, he was exceptionally entrepreneurial, constantly investing in new technologies and farming innovations. I was studying electrical engineering at the time, and while we were discussing what I was going to do after college, he was emphatic that I should focus all of my efforts on trying to find a cheaper way to synthesize nitrogen. He was thinking about how much money he had spent on anhydrous ammonia to run the farm, and he thought that if someone could come up with a cheaper way to synthesize it (especially if he could do it himself), he'd save a fortune. Now that I read this book, I found myself wondering whether he was aware of the Haber-Bosch process and how it had already made ammonia plentiful, or maybe knew about it and still felt like ammonia was too expensive and scarce. I know we discussed how nitrogen is naturally fixed in nature from lightning strikes, but I don't recall whether we talked about any other processes. Anyway, based on what I've read about Haber-Bosch, this process has stood the test of time and is still the primary way that nitrogen is synthesized from our atmosphere today.
  
  Since reading this book, I've been hit with the whole Baader-Meinhof effect and now feel like I'm reading about Haber-Bosch and nitrogen fixing everywhere. I was just listening to a BBC podcast about the 50 most important inventions that made the modern economy, and guess what was in the first 5 topics: Haber-Bosch.
  
  I'm not sure that I'd read this again - I feel like this isn't a topic that I'll get a lot more out of if I read it a second time, but I'd be up for reading more books that cover foundational inventions. This book certainly made me appreciate the role nitrogen plays in our lives and economy.
• 
  Benjamin

  I came across a copy of this book recently and noticed that North Carolina State University used it for their common reading in 2013. I am a big fan of books that colleges use for common reading and I feel like its a good way to keep your finger on the pulse of important topics. So, I bought the copy I saw and decided to read it almost right away.
  
  I started reading this yesterday afternoon and immediately blew threw it. After two weeks of reading Foucault, Wallace and Pynchon this reading felt like a breeze. I don't have much knowledge about the scientific aspects of this book, but that was fine because this is almost more of an adventure book anyway. Part 1 of this book introduces us to the issue that, in the late 1800s, the world is going to run out of fertilizer soon, and there needs to be a quick solution. This part of the book details the trade of Guano and a war between Chile and Peru, which was really fascinating.
  
  Part 2 of the book introduces us to our two main figures in the book, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. We run through the trials and tribulations of both men in their desire to produce ammonia and create factories that benefit Germany. This part of the book is pretty interesting and lays out a lot of history that we traditionally do not discuss.
  
  Ultimately in Part 3 we see the rise of Hitler and the unethical use of the machines and production that was pioneered in Part 2. We see Haber and Bosch both fall from grace into despair and death.
  
  This book constantly reminded me of one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut had a history of questioning science and its application. Yes science does bring us wonderful innovation, but what is the cost? In the case of Vonnegut, he railed against World War 2 actions and Vietnam, particularly bombing. In The Alchemy of Air we are asked if the science that brought us fertilizer that now feeds billions was worth the framework that lead to the Holocaust. That's up for you to decide.
  
  The book closes with presenting us the problem that Nitrogen is becoming too apparent in our environment. This is leading to issues like algae blooms and may be a part of global warming. Her again we have to ask ourselves is it worth feeding billions of people at the detriment of the environment. These are major questions that I don't think anyone has the answers to. It's troubling and something I'll be thinking about for awhile.