So you can all thank him for your existence.
The early 1900s were tough times, and Fritz Haber had a pretty fucked-up childhood. It started before he was even born and went down like this; his dad Siegfried hooks up with his first cousin Paula, marries her, and gets her pregnant with Fritz. New mum Paula immediately dies after giving birth, his dad abandons him to some crazy aunts and runs off to marry a Hamburger (fact!).
After university, Fritz works at his dad’s chemical company, there’s a lot of arguing with his dad and developing plenty of hate there, but the benefit was that he could also play with cooking up all sorts of nasty chemical stuff.
~IT’S A CASE STUDY ON HOW BADDIES ARE MADE~
Fritz was also born a “Jewish-German” which was a complicated thing back in the day, and like most evil geniuses he longed to be the ‘German’ bit way more than the ‘Jewish’ bit, which probably gave him the chronic inferiority complex which eventually spiraled out of control until he was like –
“FUCK IT. I’M JUST GOING TO BE A BADDIE”
– FritzY Haber
At some point just before 1900, Grand Duke Fred Von somebody gives him the official Baddie title of “Extraordinarius Fritz” and the rest is history.
Enter Clara…
Clara was the typical blonde hottie of the day:
Her papa owned a sugar factory and she did very very well at school, leaving the boys in her class way behind her, probably one of those girls with perfect handwriting, who writes their ‘a’s like this:
She looked good on paper as well – the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Breslau. She was also a pacifist, woman’s rights activist, and a bit of a perfectionist too. Perhaps their joint love of chemistry got them to hook up together. Perhaps. I dunno.
Rowdy Dinner Party
A day or two after a rowdy Fritz dinner party at home, (where Clara, who is now Fritz’s wife now and clearly at the end of her tether with her husband and his shitty baddie jokes, runs outside, shoots herself in the heart, and dies in her 12-year-old son Hermann’s arms), Fritz is off to the Eastern Front to oversee the worlds first deployment of chemical weapons (he invented the first weapons of mass destruction) which earns him the title:
~Father of chemical warfare~
Man oh man, a real asshole. But he’s also the asshole that also came up with a way to feed the people of Earth. And the trick he invented is still responsible for making at least half of the food that you eat.
This is because Fritzy invented the Haber Process, modestly named after himself, and also because it’s the way that we get nitrogen out of the air and make fertilizer with it. It was a tricky thing to do, according to the scientists of the day, even Einstein, (who invented quantum physics and did other hard stuff like maths) was very impressed and gave him props.
Now, nitrogen gas in the atmosphere seems very boring and non-reactive because, well – it is. It’s nature’s fire retardant and it’s there so that forests don’t explode after a lightning strike. Lots of nitrogen in the air means that cigarettes smolder alluringly in our mouths and kill us slowly, rather than explode in our faces. Nitrogen is a bit like that distant uncle of yours who always turns up to the family barbecue and doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything. Nothing riles him up. He chills everyone out just by being there, at least while he is sober.
But like your uncle after a dozen lagers, when nitrogen begrudgingly mingles chemically with other stuff, it is anything but boring. Without nitrogen, there would be no life, no fireworks, and no cocaine. It has always been present in every living thing, including our own body, mostly as protein (sometimes as cocaine).
Prior to Fritzy, the source of nitrogen to make protein in our bodies was mostly natural, from biological processes in soil including certain fungi and termites, and in the roots of various plants that harbor a special kind of bacteria. Of course, ‘natural’ also means ‘takes fucking ages’ and we impatient humans needed to find a way to speed this slow af nature shit up…ffffffff
Speeding things up
The Haber Process is a way to make ammonia, which is a gas that smells like pee after you eat asparagus rolls, and which is used to make “ammonium nitrate” fertilizer to feed the world. And also most of the bombs that kill everyone as well.
This Fritz Chemical goop basically feeds us all on Planet Earth. It’s also useful for blowing up mountains in order to get valuable swag out of them and also to kill loads of humans when those same humans invent weak excuses to go ahead and blow each other up. Ammonium nitrate is like that psycho next-door neighbor who murdered his whole family but prior to that everyone thought he was ‘Such a nice guy and always said hello to me in the morning’.
We are what we eat
So how are Fritz chemicals used to make our food? The science graph below should help you understand.
Carbohydrates are a form of energy storage for plants. We eat them and get this energy. They aren’t that good for us though – overdoing carbs does fucked up things to our hormones, our brain, our teeth our genitals, and many other things, but most people don’t really care because carbs and sugar taste grrrrrrreat to eat and remind us of all the best times we had when we were kids.
Fritz chemicals are largely responsible for the leading-to-armageddon population explosion of the last 100 years. It’s why queues were invented, why we get stuck in traffic jams all the time and why TikTok got so big, and lots of other things, some good some bad.
Now, nitrogen is free. Nobody can charge you for it because it’s basically what 70% of the atmosphere is made from which means that even if some of us wanted to be greedy we couldn’t hoard it because it’s pretty easy for anyone to steal as much as they want.
But making synthetic Fritz chemicals requires a source of hydrogen gas. Well, that’s easy you say, because water contains hydrogen and it falls from the sky and the sea is made of it, so it’s free!
Unfortunately, because humans like to cut corners in the name of economics, it’s a bit cheaper for us to make hydrogen gas from fossil fuel, even though fossil fuel isn’t free at all, and there definitely aren’t endless amounts of it.
But the scientists and corporations must have their reasons, and they have our best interests at heart, as always…
The result is that the 175 million tons of Fritz chemical humans make every year consumes about 3-5% of all natural gas produced globally, and pumps out hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2…
And now you ask, how much of this unsustainable synthetic fertilizer Fritz chemical goop do we eat? Just how much of the protein in our body is made with chemicals that were created in a factory fed by petrochemicals and invented by an Evil Genius….? The answer is; most of it.
“This can’t be good…”
– Dear Reader’s thoughts
Heaps. We eat heaps and heaps and heaps and heaps of Fritz chemicals. More than half the protein in our bodies is made from nitrogen coming from Fritz chemicals and continues to be replaced by more food that is made with Fritz chemicals, while we make over 100 million new babies a year and keep feeding them even more Fritz chemicals (indirectly of course – if you feed a baby Fritz chemicals directly it will die).
Without Fritz chemicals, and with current agricultural practices, we’d need four times the land we currently have in order to feed the world’s population as it is today.
So now you’re thinking…
“Should I be worried?”
– Dear Reader’s Thoughts
Well….if you want to worry about the fact that your food is made in a chemical factory using piles and piles of fossil fuel petrochemicals that will definitely run out one day, that’s up to you. Most of us will have partied all our parties, had kids, spent every penny of their inheritance, trashed the place (expertly, as only humans know how), and be long dead before this all becomes a problem. It would be nice to know that we’re not on a clearly obvious and certain path to the complete destruction of humanity as we know it, even though the Earth itself might breathe a sigh of relief. But as for Fritz, he’s a Baddie for sure – bona fide, 100% certified by us here at WATB.
