Fritz+Haber

 **__¤ Fritz Haber ¤__** (1868-1934)

 __**    Personal History     **__ Fritz Haber, (1868-1934) a German chemist, has accomplished more in a life time than many people can dream of. Son of Siegfried Haber, a well known merchant, he grew up in a Jewish family. Haber attended St. Elizabeth classical school and soon after studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, University of Berlin, and the Technical school of Charlottenburg. After Haber achieved his university degrees, he volunteered his time at his father's chemical business, the Swiss Federal Institution of technology in Zurich. Extremely passionate about science, Fritz believed that science had the ability to mold the human-race. Science was not only a part of his professional life, but since his wife was also a chemist, science became the centre of his life and he knew nothing else. In 1901 he married Clara Immerwahr and they had their first son Hermann the year after. However, her death came in 1915 and Haber eventually remarried and another 2 children, but he never settled in a permanent country or residence. This hard working engineer and chemist died at 65 of heart problems in 1934 in a Switzerland hotel.


 * __     Interesting Facts        __**

Throughout his eventful life, Haber experienced many personal setbacks. Even though his first wife Clara Immerwahr had been his fellow chemist, she strongly disliked him working so closely with dangerous gases. This was the reason she committed suicide, stabbing herself in the heart in the back yard. Ironically, Fritz had left that’s same tragic morning before her death to Russia to witness a particular gas release against the Russians. Suicide would reoccur in the Haber family when Hermann, Fritz’ son from Clara, killed himself in 1946. Haber had been Jewish, coming from German decent. But the increasing hatred toward Jews and Nazi persecution influenced Fritz to convert to Christianity in 1892 at the age of 24. This however didn’t stop the Nazi from recognizing his Jewish background, so he was eventually forced to leave Germany.

This particular man was not only great with chemicals but was also gifted in conversation. Haber often used unusual comparisons and parallels, and sometimes even spoke in his own rhyming verse and couplets. Early this year in 2008, a short film was written and directed by Daniel Ragussis about the life Fritz Haber. Entitled "Haber", the father of chemical warfare, its about Haber’s chemical progresses, his work as a patriotic German, and how his decision to partake in creating chemical weapons led to his glory as a hero, and in part a killer with the suicide of his wife Clara.

**__ Major Experiments, Contributions, or Discoveries  __** Fritz Haber has done an enormous amount of work throughout his lifetime. Being born in the late 1800s meant that he witnessed World War I. However, he was not just a witness, he contributed a lot to the development of chemical warfare during World War I. Haber helped create gas masks with absobent filters. Although he helped save human lives, he also developed ways to destroy others'. Faber led research teams into producing chlorine and other deadly gases for use in trench warfare.

The period of time between the two World Wars, Fritz Haber produced his firedamp whistle, which was designed for the protection of miners. He also invented the quartz thread manometer for recording low gas pressures. It was during his research that he oberved that absorption powers can be due to unsaturated valence forces of a solid body. Later on, Langmuir founded his abosorption theory based on Haber's observation.

During his studies of poisonous gases and the effects of it, Fritz Haber realized that exposure to a low concentration of a deadly gas for a long time has the same effect as exposure over a short period of time to a high concentration of poisonous gas. The effect it causes of course is death to whomever is being exposed. From this realization, he formulated a mathematical relationship between gas concentration and exposure time. This discovery of the relationship became known as **Haber's Rule.**

C= the concentration of the gas (mass per unit volume) t= the amount of time to breathe the gas before a toxic effect happens k= a constant depending on C and t

Fritz Haber's most well known accomplishment was the development of synthesizing ammonia. Haber recieved the Nobel Prize Award in Chemistry because of this experiment. During the early 20th century, agriculture was a huge part of many countries' economy. Along with farming came fertilizers. Eventually, the world-wide demand for nitrogen-based fertilizers became so high that it exceeded the existing amount! Scientists around the world were in a hurry to find a solution to solve the dependency for the limited supply of natural sources of ammonia and nitrogen compounds. It was Haber, and Carl Bosch, who found this solution. Haber invented a large-scale catalytic synthesis of ammonia from elemental hydrogen and nitrogen gas. These two reactants are abundant throughout the world and inexpensive. Using high temperatures, approximately at 500 degrees Celcius, and high pressure (around 3000 psi), and an iron catalyst, Haber could force relatively unreactive gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen to combine into ammonia. Due to Haber's invention, the supply of ammonia is now capable of meeting its world-wide demand. With the ammonia, many important substances can now be made. Few examples are fertilizers used for agriculture and explosives used in mining and warfare. 

 As a chemist, Haber studied many aspects in the field. He studied the nature of the quinone-quinol system, in which he devised a glass electrode to measure hydrogen ion concentration by means of the electric potential across a thin piece of glass. Haber researched and investigated on the studies of fuel cells, the electrolysis of crystalline salts, and the measurement of the free energy of oxidation of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon. Although his experiment of obtaining gold from sea water did not suceed, it contributed to the solution for extracting bromine from the ocean.

Fritz Haber was a great chemist. Known as the "Father of Chemical Warfare", Haber has changed our warfare strategy extremely. He has also contributed and enabled us into being able to grow more crops for our growing population, due to his solution for synthesizing ammonia. For good or for bad, Fritz Haber's contributions and discoveries have changed everyone's lives and has put a new chapter in history.

__** For his work on the fixation of Nitrogen from air, known as the Haber-Bosch process, he was given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1918 (awarded in 1919). 
 * __ Awards

 Apart from the Nobel Prize, Haber received many honours during his life. At Max von Laue's instigation, the Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem was renamed the Fritz Haber Institute after his death.

Due to Faber being a patriotic German and his contribution in World War I, he was ranked as a 'captain' by the Kaiser. It is rare for a scientist to be given such a high rank in the military.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1918/haber-bio.html [|**people.clarkson.edu/ ~ekatz/scientists/haber.htm**] http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/ci/1992/Haber.html http://www.geocities.com/bioelectrochemistry/haber.htm <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">http://www.haberfilm.com/story.html <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
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__** Quotes **__ // After a sixteen-week survey of the country, Haber wrote: "It is above all a question of self-estimation and enterprise. No nation has these virtues in a higher degree than the people of the United States. Its spirit of enterprise is the natural inheritance of their ancestors, who, whatever might have drawn them from their old homes, had the courage to build up new homes in a foreign country under strange and uncertain conditions. The self-estimation, however, of the individual man as well as of the nation, is perhaps the most essential trait of the American character. It manifests itself in various forms: in the early independence of youth: in the national sensitiveness which we often observe with surprise in the common people, as reflected in the daily press; in the opposition of any individual to official guardianship; in the ambition of the nation which wants to rid itself of its intellectual dependence on other countries. In my intercourse with widely-differing individuals among American chemists, nothing appeared to me so remarkable as their common tendency to prove and to have recognized the equal and independent standing of the industrial accomplishments of the United States as compared with the older successes of Europe." - Fritz Haber //[|//http://www.soils.wisc.edu/~barak/soilscience326/haber_amsci.htm//]

// "The interest of a wider circle has its source in the recognition that ammonia synthesis on a large scale represents a useful...way to satisfy an economic need. This practical usefulness was not the preconceived goal of my experiments. I was not in doubt that my laboratory work could furnish no more than a scientific statement of the foundations and a knowledge of the experimental equipment, and that much had to be added to this result in order to attain economic success on an industrial scale." - Fritz Haber //[|//http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/ci/1992/Haber.html//]