Bombs and Bananas

The duality of innovation

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Fate is not without a sense of irony. The Second Industrial Revolution saw industrial innovation spread outside Britain. This led to a military arms race and eventually, the “Great War” that saw millions of deaths. Not all was lost, for the same rivalry also gave birth to innovations that would save billions of lives thereafter. After 1900, ascendant world power Germany found itself in a difficult position. With supplies of bomb-making and fertilizer ingredients controlled by foreign powers, German scientists embarked on a project to leverage their chemical expertise and derive these ingredients from the air we breathe. Their success resulted in a near-limitless supply of fertilizer to grow food.

An Energy Revolution

Previously, we briefly walked through the history of agriculture, from pre-history to the industrial revolution. I made the case that energy abundance, specifically in this case, the availability of stored solar energy contained within the food that we eat, was a key prerequisite for the industrial revolution to take hold. Food availability and agricultural output are cornerstones of sustained human progress. However, just as the early Industrial Revolution and the population began to grow more rapidly in the late 18th Century, there were warning signs on the horizon.

Thomas Malthus, an English economist, took note of the rapid population growth, which was faster than at any time in human history. Using forecasting models, he came to a dire conclusion; the population was growing geometrically while food output was constrained to grow linearly, limited by the amount of land that could be tilled. Soon, he prophesized, mass famine and death lay ahead for us, all as the number of mouths to feed exceeded the food that could be grown. Malthus, of course, turned out to be wrong because the very same forces of progress, a rising population, urbanization, and technological advancements that led to this increased food consumption also led to increased food output.

But increasing agriculture output further was no trivial feat. The key limitation that farmers had faced throughout history was nitrogen in the soil. Plants require nitrogen for growth as the element is a significant component of chlorophyll and amino acids. Soil nitrogen, however, is produced at the whim of nitrogen-fixing microbes that live in the soil or on the roots of some plants. They produce nitrogen too slowly to keep pace with human agriculture, and soon the soil becomes depleted and exhausted. This limits the amount of food that can be squeezed out of a hectare of land.

But nitrogen isn’t rare. In fact, the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of about 78 percent nitrogen. However, this nitrogen is in the form of N2 gas, an extremely stable nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond, making the gas almost completely inert and unusable for plants. In the latter half of the 19th Century, chemists found a solution to our nitrogen problem, albeit a temporary one. They noticed that guano, essentially seabird and bat droppings, were extremely rich in the nutrients required for plant growth, including, most crucially, usable nitrogen.

Almost overnight, a guano industry emerged, with millions of tons harvested around the world and shipped back to Europe. Guano was so sought-after that sources were quickly depleted where they were found. In Ichaboe Island for example, off the coast of Namibia, a mine was set up in March 1843 and was fully depleted by May 1845, leaving the island bare, deserted, and 15 feet shorter than it had been before exploitation. The same boom and bust cycle played out wherever guano was found. It was clear that, like the nitrogen in the soil itself, our demand for food would eventually deplete available deposits.

An Unlikely Solution

As the 19th Century drew to a close, the industrial revolution was spreading rapidly outside Britain. Germany found itself an ascendant world power in a precarious position. The country had a rapidly growing demand for usable nitrogen in its arms and agriculture industries. The largest deposits of saltpeter and guano, however, key sources of usable nitrogen, were located in far-flung territories either directly controlled by the British, their chief rival or under threat by her Royal Navy.

Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch took up this challenge; to use the air around us to free Germany from foreign-controlled supply lines. In what was one of the largest and most ambitious technological “Moonshots” prior to the Manhattan Project, they painstakingly developed a method to extract usable nitrogen from the atmosphere. They developed a process whereby under intense pressure and heat, hydrogen and nitrogen gas would combine to produce ammonia when passed over an iron catalyst to accelerate the chemical reaction.

The synthetic ammonia that was produced was superior to guano when used as a raw material for fertilizer. It was also used in the production of nitric acid, a precursor required for the manufacture of chemical explosives. Large-scale commercial production using the Haber process began in 1913, just one year before the outbreak of WWI, and was, understandably, crucial to the German war effort. Unfortunately, the innovation enabled and prolonged a bloody conflict that cost millions of lives. After the war, however, the Treaty of Versailles forced compulsory licensing upon the German chemical industry; the Haber-Bosch process and its benefits quickly diffused across the globe.

The process remains largely unchanged from that developed over a century ago and ranks among the most important innovations in human history. The Haber process produces some ~100 million tons of fertilizer annually, helping feed at least half the world’s population. Quite literally, saving billions of lives, or at least, enabling more to be born and experience life. Indeed, without the Haber process, there is a good chance that you, the reader, would not be alive right now. In a world of nuclear energy and emergent AI, the Haber process is a reminder that all innovations can be used for benefit or harm. We can build bombs or grow bananas; the choice is ours.

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