The Alchemy of Air

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about the chemistry and development of modern fertilizers. It covers the importance and history of both natural and synthetic fertilizers. It also covers the history of the men and women involved in the process and their fates.

🎨 Impressions

It was quite intersting to learn about the Chile and Peru trade in Guana and salt fertilziers, as well as their role in the making of gunpowder.

The Haber-Bosch process consumes about 1 % of all energy worldwide.

The evilness of the nazi regime continues to astonish me. Their hatred and their pettyness.

The issues that the nazi war machine encountered within the logistics and industry, as described in this book, i highly relative to the main arguments of How the War was Won.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Nature offers only two ways of fixing nitrogen, getting it out of the air and into living systems: those special bacteria on the roots of peas, beans, and a few other plants, and bolts of lightning.

• Today we’re above six billion and counting. If we all ate simple vegetarian diets and farmed every acre of arable land as wisely as possible using the best techniques of the late 1800s, the earth could support a population of around four billion people.

• Fertilizer and explosives are very close in structure—so close that one can often be used for the other.

• Without Haber-Bosch, historians say, Germany would have run out of arms and surrendered two years earlier than it did in World War I.

• Farben’s first director, Carl Bosch, led me into the story. I learned quickly that he was a man of contradictions: a business mogul who won a Nobel Prize and an ardent anti-Nazi who founded and led a most infamous Nazi firm.

• The Romans worshipped a god of manure, Stercutius.

• Every few years the Chinese made sure to rotate in a crop of soybeans; chickpeas were the crop of choice in the Middle East, lentils in India, and mung beans in Southeast Asia; and Europeans used peas or beans or clover. “Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow” was more than a children’s rhyme. It was a timetable for successful farming.

• EMPTY A BAG of store-bought fertilizer and what pours out is usually a mix of three elements, N, P, and K—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—the three most essential nutrients for plants.

• By the late Middle Ages, the recipe had spread across the Middle East to Europe. There they found the same salt—which they called China Snow or nitre—growing on stone walls, especially underground, in basements and crypts. The Romans called it sal petrae (Latin for “salt of stone”).

• In England, by royal decree, the king’s saltpeter gatherers—Petermen, they were called—scoured the countryside for the white salt. They quickly became among the nation’s most reviled and feared public officials. Wherever they found saltpeter, the Petermen were warranted to dig it out, regardless of whose property it was on, regardless of the difficulties involved, even if it meant moving a privy, tearing apart a stable, or ripping up the floor of a house. Petermen opened pits, tore down walls, and commandeered carts and horses. They often took bribes.

• The mother lode of saltpeter, however, the only natural deposits in the world large enough to feed the gunpowder needs of an entire nation, was discovered in the mud flats of the Ganges in India (where it was believed that a combination of the river water, the hot climate, and the dung of holy cows combined to create a sort of huge natural saltpeter plantation). The British East India Company started shipping it to England by the ton in the mid-seventeenth century—it was one of the company’s most important cargoes—and this vital natural resource made India an especially important target for European colonial expansion.

• The end of guano also meant an end to Peru’s easy income. By the 1870s the nation was for all practical purposes bankrupt. About eleven million tons of guano had been gathered, shipped, and spread during the brief guano age.

• The Peruvian tradition was one of aristocratic control, slave labor, and resource exploitation. The Chilean tradition was relatively progressive, nationalistic, enterprising, and aggressive.

• N2 is held together with a triple bond, the strongest chemical bond in nature. Breaking it and freeing the individual N atoms requires enormous amounts of energy, heat on the order of 1,000°C, intense enough to to melt copper.

• The only thing in nature hot enough to break apart N2 is a bolt of lightning.

• Bayer had made a fortune off of aspirin, a pain reliever made from coal).

• The Germans have a name for the way an inanimate object like a machine can pick the worst possible moment to break down: Tücke des Objekts, “the spite of things.”

• When the deal was signed, BASF was no longer just a chemical firm. It was a defense industry. Bosch did not much like it. His team recognized the irony: They had worked long and hard to feed people; now the same technology was going to be used to kill them. Bosch did not talk about it much, but he felt it. One of Bosch’s top assistants remembered that during the saltpeter negotiations Bosch had referred to “this dirty business.” When the deal was done, he said, he was going to drink himself into “the biggest high of my life.”

• Over the course of the war, Oppau suffered more from its own repairs (done with inferior wartime steel) and restarts than it did from enemy bombs.

• On November 9, 1918, without an enemy ever crossing its border, Germany surrendered. One-tenth of its prewar population was dead.

• The growing popularity of Hitler and his Nazis worried Bosch. The Nazis were bad for business. Their inflammatory politics would bring back the anti-German feelings that Bosch and others had tried so hard to ameliorate after the war. Their race-based rhetoric—especially their anti-Semitism—was anathema to Bosch, a man who had spent his career working with Jewish scientists and businessmen.

• Planck remembered Hitler saying that he was more concerned with communists than Jews. The problem, Hitler explained, was that “Jews are all communists. A Jew is a Jew… . They all cling together like burrs.” The only answer to the problem was to proceed against them all. When Planck tried to return to his point about science, the chancellor began talking faster and louder, pounding his hand on his knee, flying into a rage so fierce that the elderly Planck had to leave the room. Some time passed before he recovered emotionally.

• If Jews were so important to physics and chemistry, Hitler said, “Then we’ll just have to work one hundred years without physics and chemistry!”

• Bosch was stunned. He told friends later that Hitler seemed to go into a sort of trance when he was excited, like a man lost in a dream.

• Bosch had said about the Haber-Bosch ammonia process, “I have often asked myself whether it would have been better if we had not succeeded. The war perhaps would have ended sooner with less misery and on better terms. Gentlemen, these questions are all useless. Progress in science and technology cannot be stopped. They are in many ways akin to art. One can persuade the one to halt as little as the others. They drive the people who are born for them to activity.”

• As Leuna (and the other German synthetic gasoline factories targeted by the Allies) slowly began failing, Germany began starving for fuel. The Luftwaffe was especially hard hit. Pilot training was cut back because there was no fuel. Speer heard reports of air fields where trained flyers had only enough fuel to get into the air every third day. The army began suffer as well. Speer told his government of a column of 150 German military trucks in Italy being pulled by oxen.

• Still, the demand for their products is so great that Haber-Bosch plants today consume 1 percent of all the energy on earth, and the largest factories produce so much ammonia that it has to be transported in pipelines (one of the first ammonia pipelines in the United States, built in the late 1960s, for instance, runs from the plant in Texas to the corn fields of Iowa).