Fritz Haber: The Man Who Invented Chemical Warfare

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hey everybody. I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards.
I don't have a fun lead in for the episode
this week because Sophie is not here and uh, she's
she's thrown me off, so you should drag her on
Twitter and and say why didn't Robert have a have
a funny what's excell and my wise? You know, the
real reason I didn't have a good intro is because

(00:20):
I thrive on on shocking her with my new terrible introduction. Uh.
And with nothing terrible, no Sophie to shock I have,
I have nothing terrible to say. But I do have
a great episode of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where
we tell you everything you don't know about the very
worst people in all of history. Uh. And I have
two great guests with me. I have Oz and Kara,

(00:44):
co hosts of the Sleepwalkers podcast. Very happy to have
you here, very happy to be here, Thank you, thank
you for having us. And uh, how are you guys
doing this week? How's how's everything conking out in your
end of the world. Well, we may also be Sleepwalkers.
Fairly shortly. We had quite a long one, but we're

(01:05):
very excited. We're midway through season one of Sleepwalkers, and um,
you know, it's amazing. We're kind of we're getting more
momentum and people are wanting to talk to us on
the show, which is great. But you know, we're kind
of recording interviews and pushing out live and the world
of AI never sleeps unlike Sleepwalkers, So we're kind of wait, wait,
we're we're doing good. But we're we're, we're We're We're Yeah,

(01:26):
We're We're the end of a long Friday. And Sleepwalkers
is kind of about you know, you picked the title
because it's sort of about the kind of unintended and
unforeseen consequences of AI, of all these sort of algorithms
and machines that we are increasingly handing over control of
our lives too. Would that be an accurate summary, I
would say so yeah. And also, I guess we're not

(01:47):
too late, but there are definitely things that are already
happening that we probably should have been focusing on a
little while ago. Um, so you know the point of
the show is to equip people to not sleep walk
into the future. Well than today is a perfect episode
for us all to be talking about because this this
really is an episode. There's a bastard here, um. But

(02:09):
more than anything, this is an episode about the unintended,
unforeseen consequences of technology, of people adopting a cool new
thing that has a lot of promise for the future
and not thinking about all of the all of the
things that will change about the world. Um. Have you
all ever heard of a fellow named Fritz Haber? Yes? Now,

(02:30):
what do you What do you know about old Fritzie?
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Oh boy, I shouldn't
have said yes, because I know the name, but I
really don't know what I'm gonna Everyone heard his name
at some point in high school history class or whatever.
But yeah, yeah, tell just tell me. Well, Fritz Haber
is a number of things, so you would have heard
of him. Uh, for the haber Bosch process, which is

(02:54):
how we get nitrogen um the majority of the nitrogen
that we get um. But Fritz Haber is also the
father of chemical warfare. UM. Now, that probably qualifies him
as a bastard on its own, But unfortunately, Fritz's legacy
is a lot more complex than than just that. Because
if you're a human being who exists on this earth,

(03:15):
like roughly of of our listeners are. Uh, then there's
there's between a thirty and fifty percent chance that you're
only alive because of Fritz Haber. Fritz Habert was the
beginning of chemical wolf at World War One and the
gas Oh yeah, the German World War One scientists basically. Yeah.

(03:36):
And there's some you could make some arguments like Hannibal
was said to have used psychochemically drugged wine to disrupt
an army at one point like that, But Fritz is
the first guy to really lock that ship down in
a big way. Um, he's an important dude. Uh. And
you could you could very very easily argue that he's
among a small handful of like we talked about people

(03:59):
like Hitler and stall and on this podcast. Uh, he's
in that tier of importance in terms of like his
impact on the world. Um. So I think he's one
of these guys. Until I started researching him, like you,
he was someone whose name was familiar because I'd run
across him in one of those little like boxes in
a history textbook that was like, oh you should know
about this guy. Um, today we're gonna learn the rest. So, um,

(04:23):
you're all ready to bound on into this heedless sleepwalk
into this story. Yes, yes, okay. Fritz Haber was born
in Breslau, Prussia, to a moderately wealthy Jewish family. His father, Siegfried,
was a successful small business owner, and his mother, who
was also his dad's cousin, was named Paula. Now, their

(04:44):
families were not supportive of this union because you know,
they were very very close relatives, but they were just
kind of too dtf to be denied, so to speak. Um. Now,
it turns out that marrying a very close cousin and
then having a baby with them can can cause some complications,
which it did, and Paula died three weeks after giving

(05:06):
birth to Fritz. Um, so their their families may have
been kind of right about that not being a great idea.
Child of incest okay, got it, Yeah, child Childer, and
the kind of like incest that was more I mean,
it was a little weird at the time, like some
amount of that was more normal back then. But like
this was one of those cases where everyone was sort
of like the zadd that said. Uh, Siegfried and Paula

(05:29):
were very clearly in love and and Fritz's father, Siegfried,
was devastated by his wife's death. Um, and so Siegfried
threw himself into his business, which was essentially running a
company that sold dies all around Prussia. Now today Fritz's
hometown of Breslau is part of Poland, but starting in
eighteen seventy one, when Fritz was three, it became part

(05:51):
of a newly minted little country y'all may have heard of,
called Germany. Uh the boarder of the naughty local princelings
to into unity. Yes, it was a decision that would
only have positive impacts on the world and would cause
no problems. I haven't read history past, so I assume it.

(06:13):
It worked out fine. Um. So it was an exciting time,
you know, the eighteen seventies was an exciting time for
the German people, but it would not have been an
exciting or a fun time to be someone who lived
in the Haber household. Siegfried was, of course devastated by
the loss of his wife, and to his credit, there's
no evidence that he took his sorrow out on his

(06:33):
son in a violent way, but he did kind of
take it out on him by being a totally crap
dad uh and family totally absent, just threw himself into
his business. Wasn't around, was kind of too devastated by
his wife's loss to like really stand looking at his son. Um,
So it was one of those kind of shitty dad's,

(06:54):
not like the drunken, abusive, but just like space Cadet,
I was was poor little for it. Was he kind
of cut off from his cousins and other family members
because of this this cursed union in the first place.
Or was he was he kind of after his mother died.
Was he welcomed back into the wider family? Oh? Yeah,
he was. He was taken care of by the rest
of the family. Um, he had several aunts and they

(07:15):
sort of raised him while his dad was as his
family's His dad was basically living from his memories and
working twenty four hours a day, So his aunts took
care of him and he was kind of raised by
his extended family. Now, when Fritz was seven in Germany
was four, Siegfried finally fell in love again with the
perfectly named Hedwig Hamburger, which is one of the best

(07:36):
names I've encountered. Um, yeah, I always forget Hamburger. Is
it totally suitable German last name? Yeah? Yeah, it's I.
I can't not laugh at it, um, which I'm sorry
hamburgers who might happen to be listening, like McDonald is
a last name, and it makes me go, yeah, yeah,
what makes me think of President Kennedy as well in

(07:58):
Germany in the sixties saying and Berlina which means I'm Berlina,
but all simon donuts, so he had the whole whole
crowd cracking up in his face. So a donut and
a hamburger, yes, yes, So they get to laugh at
us too, for like our things that we say that
sound like that sounds like food names. It's fair. So uh.
Siegfried and Hedwig had three daughters in quick succession, and

(08:20):
by all accounts, Hedwig was a wonderful step mom to
the growing Fritz. So this isn't one of those stories
where the special young boy grows up under an evil stepmother.
He just you know, his dad never really connected with him. Um.
So young Fritz had an eclectic set of interests. He
liked the theater, and he also did well in philosophy
and literature. His father was well off enough by this
point for Fritz to attend the Gymnasium, which was sort

(08:42):
of the equivalent of a very high end private school
in Breslau. Uh. Starting as a preteen, Fritz spent lots
of time in Breslau's beer halls and taverns. This was
not abnormal at the time. It was pretty normal for
twelve year old kids to go go to the bar
at the end of a hard day of me and
twelve and tie a cup. Actually a very hard age, Yeah,
oh yeah, I mean middle school would have been a

(09:05):
lot easier with a with a couple of pints at
the end of well, we had that in texts now um.
As he grew older, Fritz fought increasingly with his father.
One relative wrote that Siegfried was a born pessimist uh
and while his son was reckless, Fritz had a reputation

(09:27):
on the family for having a lively sense of humor.
And it kind of seems like he was into the
what I would call the eighteen hundreds German equivalent of
freestyle rap. Yeah it's it's I have trouble picturing it,
but I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote from the
book Mastermind by Daniel Charles, which is a biography of

(09:50):
Fritz Haber. Quote. Young Fritz developed a knack for the
composition of rhyming verse even on the spur of the moment.
His teasing dog roll become the centerpiece of the family's
annual New year 's Eve celebrations. Fritz composed the verses
and taught them to his sisters, who presented them dressed
in costume. Our childhood and youth were illuminated by our
brother's talents, which always came forth at the right moment.
Recalled Elsie, the oldest of the sisters. So that sounds

(10:12):
a little bit like just like being a Jewish kid.
Oh is that is? That is very much that you
and you make your younger siblings do them. I wanted
to tie it to battle rap, but I guess it
might be it might be a little older than that.
And as far as we know, did Fritz did Fritz
take his show on the road with a local with
the local ladies in bres Lau, impressed by his his

(10:35):
just spit this dogge role? Or was it more of
another family of fair should we say? Fritz was not
what you would call a player at this point in
his life, although he is like fourteen right now, so
probably shouldn't have been um. Although that was like thirty
in entertaining lifespan. Yeah. So. Fritz graduated from the gymnasium

(10:57):
in eighteen eighties six, at the age of fifteen. His
grades were good, but not great in most subjects. His
real standout came during his oral examination. It was clear
at this age that Fritz's talent was in his ability
to communicate, rather than some innate mechanical genius for it.
Celebrated his graduation by getting ship house wasted all night
with his friends in the local bars. He was still

(11:18):
passed out the next morning when the family sat down
for breakfast, so his father took his sister's to see.
There hung the funk over brother while Siegfried declared, look, well,
this is how the life of a drunkard begins. So
get a sense of his dad sympathetic. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
He's just tried, just a simple fifteen year old drunken

(11:38):
graduation celebration. Should don't make a big deal of it, dad, Now,
Siegfried wanted his son to apprentice as a die seller
and get into the family business, but Fritz was already
fed up with his hometown and had no desire to
take up that line of work. He wrote this in
a letter to his friend, the also perfectly named Max Hamburger,

(12:00):
A lot of hamburgers rolling around in Breslau. No buns,
no buns, no buns, no buns, just hamburgers like a terrible,
terrible Windy's quote. Nothing, absolutely nothing satisfying to do, no stimulation,
only irritation and tedium. Having to watch out for this,
and that I'm so disgusted with my entire life here

(12:20):
that i could burst. It's the same feeling that makes
both of us to satisfied, the urge to extricate oneself
from narrow surroundings, to abandon it all costs, the harbor
into which my father has withdrawn himself after arduously weathering
the storms of life, to sail out into the limit
limitless ocean of life and future, guided by no other
star than one's own will, and striving so equivalent to

(12:41):
fuck you, dad, or yeah, that's exactly what. This is
the same letter that Justin Bieber wrote to Scooter Braun
at seven in Canada, exactly what we just heard. Yeah,
I want to get the hell out of this town
and go do something. And you're boring dad, Yeah, Yeah,
kids don't change, although they sure had better vocabularies back then. Um. Now, Uh,

(13:05):
Haber had been interested in chemistry for years, and one
of his aunts had actually allowed him to use her
spare room to conduct dangerous homemade experiments, which is a
sign that Haber's extended family was pretty sweet. Uh. He
received his father's permission to study chemistry after a long argument. Uh.
And he first traveled to Berlin and then to Heidelberg,
where he studied under Robert Bunsen, who you might know
as the inventor of the Bunsen burner. Now, apparently Bunsen

(13:28):
was a dick h and was kind of bad at teaching,
and so uh, Fritz Haber didn't really take to chemistry
at first and thought he might not be suited for
the field. Uh. He definitely was not a genius in
the subject, and he was frustrated by the fact that
other people were better at the work than him. So
he's kind of got that like gifted kid thing where
like you you grow up in your your school being

(13:50):
told you're good at stuff, and then you like start
actually getting into the field and meeting other people who
were better, and he's like instantly turned away from wanting
to get into the work as a result of chemistry. Yeah,
that's that kind of for me. Yeah, but no tell
me because how much chemistry is involved in making dies?
Because I was I would think maybe dad would think, Okay,
you know, Fritz wants to go and do chemistry. Uh,

(14:12):
that's an important process, uh, and making and making good dies.
Maybe actually he's going to serve the family business when
he comes back from Heidelberg. I think that was sort
of the sort of the thought, because it seems like
his dad he'll he'll wind up sort of back in
the family business briefly for a while. And he did
look into like doing that sort of work. But I

(14:33):
think he was kind of trying to just get get
the hell away from home. Um. Yeah, so he's going
to tell his dad whatever he had to tell him
to get out of there now. Fritz's studies were interrupted
in eight eight when he was drafted into the military
to do his mandatory term of service in the Prussian Army.
He served in a field artillery regiment, and he seemed
to like it. Fritz attempted to become a reserve officer

(14:53):
as a way of moving forward socially. Now being a
military officer in Germany at the time was like a
big deal in a way that there's not really an
equivalent in in the United States or in most modern countries.
I think it actually might be most comparable to like
being knighted in the UK, like it's a really big
social deal, Like even if you're not actively serving, being

(15:14):
an officer is like it was like a huge thing. Um.
But Fritz was not allowed to become a reserve officer
because he was Jewish and it was Prussia in the
eighteen eighties, and uh yeah, so Haber was Jewish, but
in a way in what like his Judaism was more
important to everyone around him because of how bigoted people

(15:36):
were against Jewish folks back then than it was to him. Um.
As a child, his family was not religious. He didn't
grow up attending synagogue. His family celebrated Christmas, but they
weren't religious about that either. It was just sort of
like the thing to do. Um. They were. They were secular,
and they were kind of the first generation of European
Jewish people who had the opportunity to really live that way. Um.

(15:58):
In eighteen twelve, the Prussian gun Men had issued a
special edict declaring that Jews should be treated as loyal
citizens of the country, which was actually kind of revolutionary
at the time, which gives you a hint for how
where my family's from. It's Prussia, yes, my grandfather, So
eighteen twelve is when Prussia was like, all right, you
guys can be loyal citizens. There's not officially government suspicion

(16:21):
against you. So yeah, it's it's one of those things
like what people wonder about, like how things got so
bad in the forties, and like it wasn't that long
ago that the government like had declared Jewish people were
equal citizens, like you know, it was it was a
long history of fighting to get to that point. Um,

(16:41):
and even like seventy years beyond that, Fritz still couldn't
become an officer. Background do we think that Fritz had
already encountered sort of anti semitism, low great anti semitism
around bres Lau, What do you think constantly constantly? It
wasn't like a huge to him constantly he was Again, yeah,
I would. It would be probably comparable to like the

(17:03):
kind of background racism that's really common in the United
States today for for people of color, where it's this
sort of thing that you just grow up knowing certain
roads are going to be more dangerous for you. Like
there's there were all these churches in Germany. There's still
some churches in Germany that have um like stained glass
reliefs of anti Semitic conspiracies and stuff that date back

(17:24):
to like the fifteen hundreds and stuff like. There's that
still exists in Germany. It was even more common back then.
So you know, he was he he grew up in
a time where Jewish people were starting to believe that
they could advance in society and become equal German citizens.
But it would not have been lost on him that, Uh,
that was a new opportunity, and he he seemed to

(17:45):
be kind of focused on making the most of that opportunity.
He converted to Christianity, again not out of he was
not religious. He didn't go to church. He did it
for like social reasons, because he wanted to be able
to get jobs and stuff. Um. So Fritz earned his
doctorate on His grades weren't great and he almost flunked physics,

(18:06):
but he did well enough to get to call himself
Dr Fritz Haber, So that's cool. Uh. He set out
to start working as a chemist and pretty much immediately
got his butt kicked by the real world. He found
himself outmatched by the other scientists he worked around, and
was frustrated by the fact that every good idea he
had was something that a better scientist was already working on.
He felt unable to contribute to any work he found useful.

(18:27):
In six months after graduating, twenty three year old Fritz
headed back to Breslau to work at his dad's business.
So with his tail between his legs. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he comes running home. Not a lot of stick tuitiveness
out of the out of the young Fritz. He says,
you're the drunk Your drunk sons back. Your drunk son
is back in. Chemistry is not going to be the
thing for me. Um. Now, what do you do when

(18:51):
your first attempt at becoming a chemist fails and you
wind up working at the family die selling business. You
invent I die. That's a good op, that's a good option.
Fritz decided to try to be a disease profit here.
That was kind of yeah, that was kind of his
first move. So he was convinced, for reasons I'm not
really clear about that a cholera epidemic was about to

(19:12):
hit Germany, and so he badgered his dad to stockpile
a huge amount of lime chloride, which was the common
treatment of cholera at the day, And so his goal
was to basically have a big pile of this stuff
when the cholera epidemic hit, so that he could sell
it and like make money and make a name for himself. Um,
but how does that work as a as an anti
cholera cora is basically, you drink you drink water, bad water, right,

(19:36):
and then you get diarrhea and that you die. Yeah,
exactly for an actual cure for that or was it
like a kind of sort of you know, I don't remedy,
shall we say it was? It was not a home remedy.
It was a commonly prescribed remedy at the time. I
don't think it had terrible Yeah, yeah, I mean they

(19:58):
were given babies hair a and for coughs at that point.
So it's not wasn't wasn't the golden age of medical science?
Um and uh, but you know, fortunately for Germany, but
unfortunately for Fritz, there was no callra epidemic and his
his dad's business took a massive hit and Fritz was
forced to head back into the world of science to
make his fortune. He had to sell it off for

(20:23):
pennies on the dollar. It was. It almost wiped out
the family business. So his attempt to profit off of
a horrible illness did not succeed um, which is a shame,
you know. Yeah. Yeah, Now we're gonna talk some more
about what Fritz did next and how he created the
technology that allows conservatively around three billion of the world's

(20:45):
population to eat. But first, speaking of eating, Uh, these
ads uh support the show and help us to eat. So, uh,
it's an ad pivot. That's that's what's that's what's going
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but it's happening. Products. We're back, Okay, so we're talking

(21:15):
Fritz Haber. He's just tried to profit off of a
collar epidemic that sadly did not come and so you know,
he goes back into the chemistry field, and this time
he really commits himself. He gets a teaching job in
physical chemistry. Um. The exact field he taught in was
something he had no experience with, but this time he
pushed himself to just study all night until two in
the morning, and he spent all of his days talking

(21:36):
to other experts, and this time he was able to
make inroads in the field, and in pretty short order
he'd gained an impressive expertise in his specific sort of
niche in chemistry, but his sense of inferiority did not
diminish even as his actual value in his profession increased.
According to the biography Mastermind quote, like many outsiders, he
developed a thin skin, a special sensitivity to slights. He

(21:59):
feuded with their scientists, and when criticized, he responded sharply.
When the blanch Haber's new rival in Carl's Roux, spoke
at faculty seminars, Haber regularly found the weakest point in
the bloc's argument and publicly lated bare for all to see.
Some resented his ambition and drive. The head of Carl's
Rue's chemical Institute was known to advise young students dryly
that they should take their questions to Haber. He knows everything.

(22:20):
In fact, he knows even more. He's a no at all.
So he was good at his job. Yeah, not super
well liked. Um. He was also not super successful with
the ladies. Um. He hadn't he forgot forgot that dog
rol of Us, which wish could have sent him so well, yeah,
that did not serve him. Well, he did tell his

(22:41):
friend Max Meyer. At this time, women are like lovely
butterflies to me. I admire their colors and glitter, but
I get no further. So he could have kept to
sleep with a butterfly. I mean you can do anything. Yeah,
I mean it's yes, anything as possible in the early

(23:01):
science is advancing. I believe Fritz Haber could find a
way to have a filling romantic up a butterfly. Yeah. Actually,
at the beginning of a horror movie, in my mind,
when you're talking about butterflies, I thought it was going
to be the opening sequence, and there's gonna be one
of those boxes of like dead butterflies which has been
preserved forever. And then it pan out to his face
and glint in his eye, and he making this comparison

(23:23):
and butterflies and women, but luckily sneaking into the entomology
department forbidden love. Yeah. Now, the woman Fritz would finally
convinced to love him was a lady named Clara Immli. Now,
Clara was in pretty much every way a more impressive
person than Fritz. Uh, you know, he'd sort of managed

(23:44):
to slouch his way into a doctor with with mediocre
but acceptable grades. Clara earned a doctorate too, but for
her it was a way more difficult process. For one thing,
schools like the gymnasium where Fritz had gone did not
admit female students, so Clara had to do all of
her learning through private tutors. But private tutors don't give
you the kind of degree that you need to be

(24:04):
able to attend university, so she found a work around.
Women were allowed to attend college lectures as guests if
the professor gave their permission, So Clara slowly, agonizingly convinced
professor after professor to let her sit in on their lessons.
After a year in university, she took the eighteen nineties
equivalent of a g e. D. Examination and got a
certification that gave her the same qualifications as a gymnasium graduate.

(24:27):
And after all of this she was able to actually
start her university career. And she did well enough that
in December nineteen hundred, she defended her dissertation in front
of an enormous crowd at Breslau University. Clara, Yeah, Clara
was the first women in Germany to receive a doctorate
in uh in like a scientific field, and she married
this loser. Yeah, and she marries this guy. Um and

(24:51):
she to give you an idea of sort of the
the wokeness of the time, the dean of the university
as he hands her her degrees as science welcomes each
person a respective of sex, confession, racer, nationality, which is good,
solid start. But then he added that he didn't want
to see the dawn of a new era where women
became scientists instead of homemakers. So like that was that

(25:14):
was the level where they're like, Okay, you did the work,
and we're we're woken up that we'll like, we'll let
you be a doctor, but you should still probably just
take care of some guy's house. What do you think
what do you think Clara had to do while he
was spouting this. Do you think she had to kind
of stand next to him as smiled and nod as
he said that he hoped that he wasn't going to
see the dawn of a new era. I mean, yeah,

(25:34):
I don't envy. I don't envy Hastani on that stage
next to that old buzzed you are not going to
envy her more through the course of this story, she
gets pretty fucked over in this in this whole tale,
so spoilers. So for a tragically short span of time,
Clara worked as a chemist. She was quite good at it.
There was no running away from the field when she

(25:55):
realized she wasn't like instantly the best like we saw
from dear Fritz. Um, she was very good, and she
got better. But love makes fools of us all. And
the person Clara Emma Ware fell in love with was
a mediocre chemist named Fritz Haber. They married, and Clara
moved to Karl's Rue to be a professor's wife and
to keep her husband's household. Yeah, it's it's a bummer. Um.

(26:19):
She didn't give up her career in science immediately, but
it seems to have slowly been kind of beaten out
of her by the demands of keeping Fritz comfortable and
eventually raising a family. Um. She and her husband did
collaborate on a textbook, and she would participate in conferences
and symposiums, But now that she was a professor's wife,
most of her colleagues just assumed she was parading things
that she had heard from her husband, and Fritz did

(26:41):
not strain himself to correct this misconception. So, m it's
nineteen hundred. Yeah, we still do we have any do
we have any like correspondence between her and her family name?
And how's it going at this stage? Is she is
She's starting to feel like, oh my god, all the
struggle I did, the private shooters, I I got the

(27:05):
professors to let me into the lectures, I got my
what what they'll call in a hundred and fifty years time,
my g D equivalent, And now I'm here and actually
I'm a brilliant chemist. And what I have to do
is go to these parties and accept that everyone thinks
that everything I have to say is prior to my husband.
I mean, she must have just felt terrible. Yeah, she

(27:25):
was not a happy person. Um, and we will will
read a little bit from some letters she wrote a
little bit later. Um, but yeah, this is not a
great story for Clara. Now, Clara and Fritz did have
a baby boy, Herman Uh and Fritz. As soon as
he was born. Fritz instantly left his new wife alone
with their baby to tour the United States as a
spy for the German electro Chemical Society. Um, so he's

(27:49):
he's that kind of dude. You know, Taylor's oldest time.
You know, uh, get a woman pregnant and then go
spy on the American scientific infrastructure. Um, we've all had
that happen. Uh. Now, when Fritz returned to Germany, thoroughly
inspired by what he had seen, he continued to ignore
his family in order to do science. His wife wrote

(28:10):
at the time, fritzis so scattered. If I didn't bring
him to his son every once in a while, he
wouldn't even know that he was a father. So he's
not a better dad than his dad was. I'll say
that now. Clara grew increasingly unhappy and resentful of her
husband during this period. Surprise, uh, Most of Fritz's male
scientist friends took his side, chastis and Clara for being

(28:31):
a bad wife and basically bumming everyone out with her attitude. Um,
but not everyone felt this way. Paul Krosso was one
of Habrew's students, and he was also Clara's second cousin.
He wrote quote, she completely recognized the outstanding talents and
personality of her husband, but it certainly was not easy
for her to be the wife of a great man.
She sacrificed her profession for him, and she never really

(28:51):
found the necessary substitute for it in family life. She
had no interest in playing a prominent social role, nor
was she particularly good at it. But so this and
this second cousin of has says that favor as a
brilliant scientist. So his reputation is to grow. It starts
to grow during this period, and his his brilliance is
not in He's not one of these like Eureka, I've

(29:12):
I've come up with this conclusion sort of scientists who
buries themselves in the work and then comes up with
like genius new things. Like he's um, he's a brilliant
scientist in terms of his ability to manage teams of
scientists and coalate data between them and work towards solutions
and be like this is our goal, you need to
do this, you need to do this. Oh you found
this out that gives me this idea. Like that's kind

(29:33):
of what Habers brilliant at. And so when he's just
sort of working in a lab, he's nothing special. But
once he starts to get enough of a position that
he starts managing teams of people, his particular genius starts
to become known, and that really starts happening in like
around nineteen oh fourste Yeah, yeah, that's he's a he's

(29:54):
what you would call like an industrial chemist, and he's
a genius at that um he might be the best
there ever was. Now, starting in nineteen o four, Fritz
receives a letter from the managers of the Austrian Chemical
Works Company informing him that they had found traces of
ammonia in their chemical plant. Now, this is significant because
ammonia is the most potent source of nitrogen in UH

(30:14):
in nature. Now, nitrogen is the primary building block of food,
plants and animals needed to grow. Fertilizer is mostly nitrogen.
But nitrogen isn't an easy thing to come by in
the natural world because there's only so much of it
in the soil and it's depleted by growing crops. Now,
for thousands of years before this point, farmers would plant
stuff like legumes, UH and other nitrogen rich crops in

(30:36):
order to plow them back into the soil to keep
it fertile. But as the modern era down and the
human population exploded, the earth started to run into a
nitrogen crunch. Careful organic farming did not scale well to
large populations, and the long standing strategy of abandoning farmed
outland for new land stopped working in an era in
which all of that land had already been settled and farmed.
So in the early nineteen hundreds, prominent scientists start to

(30:59):
realize that there is a massive famine on the way,
when the world's nitrogen stores are going to be depleted
and the Earth's gonna stop being able to support all
of the people who live on it. Um. At the
moment nearly nineteen hundreds, farmers were able to replenish their
soil with fertilizers derived from huge nitrogen deposits in Chile,
but those deposits were set to run out in a
couple of decades, so there's like, yeah, yeah, bird poop

(31:21):
is one of the major major sources of iguano saltpeter um,
so they've still got fertilizer for the time being. But
everyone starts to realize in the early nineteen hundreds that
like by nineteen thirty or forty, everyone's going to be
dying because we just can't keep growing food um. So
the fact that these Austrian industrialists had found ammonia created

(31:42):
as a byproduct in their chemical plant could be a
huge deal. Um. It was common knowledge at that point
that the air around us is filled with nitrogen, but
nobody knew how to like get it out of the air.
Anybody who could figure out how to do that would
basically be able to create bread from the air, which
is kind of like the scientific holy grail of a day. Um.
But of course Fritz was not at all interested in this, um,

(32:04):
and he did not get involved in fixing the nitrogen
problem out of a desire to stop a famine. Instead,
what got him involved was the fact that a guy
he considered a rival, a scientist named Nurst, was also
working on the nitrogen problem. So it was it was
a dick measuring sort of thing um. And I should
note that Nurst did not consider himself Haber's rival. Fritz

(32:25):
thought this guy was his rival because nurns discovered the
third law of thermodynamics, and Fritz really thought that he
should have discovered the third law for thermodynamics. So yeah, yeah,
he's he's just that he's just pissed at this guy
because he came up with a yeah, he figured this
thing out and Fritz didn't, and so he hated him,
and so this guy starts working on the nitrogen problem
in Fritz is like, well, I'm gonna solve this problem. Um,

(32:48):
So out of wounded pride rather than a desire to
feed the world, Fritz Haber directs his considerable intellect to
the problem of sucking nitrogen out of the sky. Um.
He gets a team on it and they start to
make progress, and he works at a deal with a
major German chemical company called B A. S f Uh
and they agree to fund his research if he can
figure out a solution, and they give him ten percent

(33:08):
of the company's net profits from his discovery. So Fritz,
you know, he he gets to work and he does
a really good job. Like his team blows through the
numerous barriers and setbacks that beat other scientists like nurnst In.
By March of nineteen o nine, they'd figured out how
to suck nctrogen out of the air and produce ammonia.
They showed off their new method in front of the
B A. S f and then Habrew threw a giant

(33:30):
party in a local hotel where everybody got so drunk that,
according to one of the scientists there, we could only
walk in a straight line by following the street car tracks.
So they do it. They figured out this. This has
become to me known as the Haber Brush process. And
like I said, there's about a fifty chance that you're
alive because of this. UM. The world population without this

(33:51):
tops out at somewhere around three or four billion people.
What exactly how how did he do it? I mean,
I'm not a I'm not a chemist. Yeah that I
wasn't going to but then I got interested to them.
It's what there's essentially a big machine that uses I
think they used uranium as a reagent in this big
machine too, like condense air into ammonium and it would

(34:12):
produce like jars of ammonia essentially, and you know you
can turn that into a fertilizer. So like, yeah, that's
what they do. UM and Fritz. Fritz would get a
Nobel Prize for this in nineteen eighteen, which I mean
he really deserved. There's three or four billion people who
are eating right now because of the Haber Bosh process.
It's one of those things that like it's kind of

(34:33):
hard to imagine the modern world without without it. UM, So, uh,
this goes great for Fritz. It means not only that
he's famous for solving the nitrogen problem, but it means
that he's going to get richish shit. But it was
not a great thing for poor Clara Haber. She wrote
a letter to one of her old scientific colleagues around
the time, saying, what Fritz has achieved in these eight years,

(34:55):
I have lost and even more and what's left fills
me with deep dissatisfaction. Even if it's general circumstances in
my own particular temperament are partly to blame for this loss,
what's mainly responsible, without a doubt, is firsts overwhelming assertion
of his own place in the household and in the marriage.
It's simply destroys any personality that's incapable of asserting itself
against him even more ruthlessly. So, wow, Clara Haber talking

(35:19):
about her husband, Um, things are going from bad to
worse in the in the Haber household. Yeah, and it
it sounds like he's you know, if you've ever worked
in like a tech company with like someone who's a
brilliant coder or engineer, but like a total asshole, Fritz
seems to be kind of that sort of personality where
he knows now that he's kind of a prima donna
Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, yeah, a little bit where he like he,

(35:44):
he decides and like Clara writes about that. She she
wrote in another letter, everyone has a right to live
their own life, but to nurture one's quirks while exhibiting
a supreme contempt for everyone else and the most common
routines of life. I think that even a genius shouldn't
be permitted such behavior, except on a dec al at island.
I think Froyd's quirk was cocaine. Yeah, and that's a

(36:04):
better quirk. That is a better quirk. Yeah, Claire would
have been. One of Kara's flamative experiences was space Camp.
And I'm wondering, Carrof, you encountered any well. I was
gonna I was gonna call him Haber's but yeah, that's
call him what they are, um future. I think future
Habres probably were the kids at Space Camp who knew

(36:24):
all the answers when we were eleven years old because
they had watched Apollo thirteen too many times. Yeah. Yeah,
and Fritz's is that kind of guy, um, which is
a lot of that. His backstory makes sense if you
can of view him through that lens the whole Yeah, exactly.
So uh Havebrew's incredible achievements led him to political power

(36:45):
as a Jewish person, This was almost unprecedented, well Christian person,
he was a Christian at this point, right not? I
mean what you actually say. Your religion is as less
important in Germany in the eighteen hundreds and your parented
right it comes from a Jewish family. Um. But he
is like one of the first Jewish people in German

(37:05):
history to ascend to a high level of political power.
He was named Geheimrat, which is a counselor to the
Kaiser's government. Um. Which was like a really big deal. Um.
So's he's a trailblazer in that um. James Frank, a
researcher who worked under Haber and a future Nobel Prize
winner himself, called his boss power hungry. Uh quote. He
knew what he was capable of, and his fingers were

(37:27):
itching to do it. Now, the First World War would
give Fritz Haber the opportunity to exercise all of the
power he had ever dreamed of. Uh. Fritz was not
a xenophobe. He didn't hate foreigners or seek war with him.
But once the wheels of war started turning in August
of nineteen fourteen. He saw it as his duty to
support the Kaiser absolutely and without question. This was something

(37:49):
that one of Haber's best friends, a guy named Albert Einstein,
who you might have heard of, UH, did not understand.
Einstein was outspoken about the fact that he had no
loyalty to the German government UH and felt that it
was basically madness to be loyal to any government anywhere,
especially a government that was as anti Semitic as the
German one. However, mean one didn't Einstein also contribute maturity

(38:11):
to the creation of the atom bomb? Yeah, I mean
yeah he did. He did during the war, but I
think that was less about his loyalty to the government
building the bomb and more about like, well, look at
how fucked up things have gotten. Maybe this will be
better than not doing it. I can't judge a guy
in nineteen forty three forty four for being like, yeah,

(38:32):
maybe we need a giant bomb. Um. But in nineteen
fourteen Haber said this, During peacetime, a scientist belongs to
the world, but during wartime he belongs to his country.
So that's what Haber believes. This is amazing I mean,
this is amazing. This an amazing story to me because
this is Hala was born in in bres Lau in Prussia,

(38:56):
which as you say, is now part of Poland, and
in the short time off to Bismarck could unified Germany.
He's able to create such essential nationalism that this guy,
this um Fritz would says, signed his first duty to
his country during wartime is his country. So how how
amazing that this myth of nationalism in the space of

(39:18):
a couple of decades was able to be so strong
that somebody who was previously a citizen of a different
country felt as loyalty to Germany. Yeah, and I think
you saw that a lot. There was a reputation in
World War One that a lot of the most sort
of fanatic German soldiers were were German Jewish Men because
they were suddenly kind of getting like the first chance

(39:40):
that their people had had to be considered equal citizens.
And I think for a guy like Haber with that background,
there was almost more of an urge to prove yourself
to the fatherland, to sort of reach that kind of
acceptance that had been impossible forty years earlier. Um So,
I do think that's a part of it. And it's
one of the many tragedies of this story because the

(40:02):
things that happened after World War One don't end so
well for Haber or his family as a result of
the fact that he was not really seen as an
equal German citizen by a whole lot of Germans. Um So, yeah,
it's gonna be a bummer. But first, it's sounding pretty dire. Yeah,
but you know what's not dire the wonderful companies that

(40:25):
support this podcast with their products and services. Um So,
why don't we all take a break, roll out to
the lobby and listen to some ads. We're back. So
at the point in which this story is World War
one has just started. Now, you guys probably heard a

(40:47):
little bit about that one. Um, it was kind of
a big deal at the time. Um people don't talk
about it so much now because it's it's a little brother.
Was kind of a bigger deal. But I'm a big
World War One. Well, we're we're also interested in World
War One. And actually the reason our podcast is called
Sleepwalkers is actually an allusion to World War One. As

(41:08):
up there's a very famous book by historian called Christopher
Clark called Sleepwalkers. How Europe stumbled into conflict I think
is the subtitle, and the idea basically is, as I
suspect we're going to be talking about shortly, that all
these new technological developments were happening at the same time
rail telegraphs, gatling gun and they'd never collided in this

(41:31):
same way as they did when suddenly the major powers
were stumbling towards this conflict that none have actually wanted.
But the technological infrastructure had its own logic, and so
this terrible, terrible, terrible conflict happened. Our show is Sleepwalkers
is not so pessimistic, but but but but our point
is if we don't study the artificial intelligence infrastructure which
is being built around us and how it's guiding us

(41:53):
towards certain conclusions, were at risk of a sleepwalking ourselves
into geopolitical outcomes which we may we may not want,
in which which nobody may want. Yeah, And I like
that quote about sort of looking at Europe in this
period as sleepwalking into the war um, because it's both
accurate for World War One but kind of accurate for

(42:14):
every massive disaster in history, like they all have the
same pattern, which is that a bunch of stuff changes.
All the people in power assume things still work the
way that did when they were kids, and like it's
the it's the same thing that happened in um in
terms of like the impact of social media and fake
news and all of this stuff. Were like none of

(42:35):
the people who were uh in in charge in any
of like the established parties and stuff new, Yeah, exactly,
none of them paying attention. Yeah, I mean. And and
by the way, today, you know, we're in the middle
of this conflict about Huawei and between China and the
United States. The founder of Huawei, who's a seventy four

(42:58):
year old on the biggest tech people in China, Ren
gen Fee, I think n I'm not sure it's saying,
but ran something he said after his daughter was arrested
in Canada and after the United States and banned US
corporations from doing business with Huawei. He said, we expected
conflict with the United States to come. We just didn't
know be this soon. Yeah, I mean, nobody ever does.

(43:21):
That's a bit scarier. One of the things that kind
of ties into the story of Fritz Haber. We can
talk about the role that a company like Huawei has
within the Chinese state, not just within the government, within
the military infrastructure, and when you talk about in the
United States companies like Raytheon and Lockheed martin Um and
how they tie into our defense infrastructure in the Pentagon
and in in in that way, like the executive branch

(43:44):
in the government. Fritz Haber's kind of the guy who
was partly responsible for inventing that world the military industrial
complex that did not exist really prior to World War One,
and the Germans were the first people to start to
figure it out in a really concrete way because they
had to because like the British Empire could afford to
be inefficient, right because it owns the whole world. France

(44:06):
can even afford to be inefficient. They've got a lot
of colonies, they've got a lot of space. Germany in
that war would get annihilated if they were inefficient. And
when the war started, industry and science weren't tied to defense.
Soldiers like generals and stuff would kind of every now
and then except that like, oh, we have to upgrade
our guns. Oh we have to upgrade. Oh we have

(44:27):
to like take advantage of this new technology. But they
were very slow and in fact, one of the big
fights prior to World War One between not just in Germany,
but British military leaders would argue about this too, is
that it was a bad idea to give soldiers automatic
weapons because they just waste bullets and it won't it
won't increase their efficiency. They're too dumb to know how
to use more bullets well. And also that I mean
they've insisted on the cavalry. I mean the beginning of

(44:50):
World Will One that the British were riding in red
jackets on horses into German machine gun fire. Can you imagine,
and the and the Germans. One of the things that
was revolutionary about the Germans at the start of that
war is that like they had kind of dark colored
uniforms as opposed to like the blue pants the French
were wearing and the red jackets and stuff. And it's like, oh,

(45:11):
it turns out it's really good if you kind of
can blend in people are shooting at you. Um, but
the idea that like you would. Fritz Haber was one
of the guys when this war kicks off who goes
to the military command and says, like, we have to
tie industry and science and arms production and the government altogether.

(45:31):
Otherwise we're not going to be efficient enough to win
this war. And he based a lot of what he
was doing what was already happening in the United States
at the time, like the like that was kind of
where some of it got inspired from, because he saw
these big endowments in the US that had been like
Rockefeller and guys had funded that were then making new
scientific equipment that was then going into like the U. S. State,

(45:52):
and he was like, Oh, if we could just do
that more efficiently, we could stand a chance against these
countries that have a lot more resources than us. So
if you're looking at the start of the military industrial complex,
it's not all down to Fritz Haber, but he's one
of the very very first handful of guys who sees
where the future is going. And it's like, all of
these parts of the state need to talk to each other, um.

(46:14):
And you can't just have industry and science divorced from
the military. They have to be working together otherwise we
can't win this war. Now. When World War One started,
the kind of plan that the Germans had was to
invade all of Europe simultaneously. Um. That was their very
ambitious plan for the start of the war, um, and

(46:35):
the logic behind it was that Germany is not a
really big country, and invading France, Russia and Belgium, like,
while it seems kind of crazy, they figured it was
their only way to win, to like knock out France
and Belgium as quick as possible and then sort of
have a leisurely fight with the Russians and one of
the Second World War, right, yeah, yeah, very similar to
their strategy in the Second World War. And there was

(46:57):
a really grim logic as to why because Germany started
World War One with six months of bullets and shells
and as you know, being British y'all, y'all ruled the waves. Uh,
And so Germany couldn't get any more bullets anymore of that.
I mean, they can, they can make bullets, but they

(47:17):
couldn't make gunpowder because gunpowder relies heavily on nitric acid
or nitrate, both of which are very nitrogen heavy compounds.
And while you can make ammonia out of the air,
there was no way to make nitrate out of the air.
At the start of the war. Are they from They
were buying from like Chile, which obviously the British navy

(47:38):
is not going to let Germany keep taking gunpowder in
when they're shooting at each other, Like, that's not gonna work.
So the Germans start this war knowing like, we got
six months at most before the bullets supply ends, so
they've got to win this fast, and that's the hope
in August of nineteen fourteen. By October they know they're
not going to win the war fast. It's turned into

(47:59):
a gigantic ship show for everybody, and Germany's eating through
their stockpiles way faster than they thought they were. So
they realized in October, we've got like six to eight
weeks of bullets left. Uh, and then that that's it
for Germany. Like so, I've got a horrible premonition that
you're going to say necessity was the mother of invention

(48:19):
in a minute, It's sure as hell was. And and
Fritz Haber was the midwife of invention, holding necessities hand
as it gives birth to. I probably extended that, but
I gotta yeah. Uh. He figured out how to derive
nitrate using a variation of the process his scientists had
already used to derive ammonium. Now this had two major effects.

(48:42):
The first of them is that it allowed Germany to
keep making bullets and explosive shells even under the effect
of the British naval blockade. The last three years of
World War One would not have been possible full stop
without Fritz Haber. That war is done in like February
March at the latest, nineteen fifteen. It's just over. And
just just to say, I mean, the Second World War

(49:05):
does obviously get a lot more attention from everybody than
the First World War. But in terms of the people
who died on the battlefield in World War One, what
kind of numbers are we talking about it? And how
many of those were after it would have come to
an end if it weren't for haberbly about twenty million
dead in the war, probably at least sixteen to eighteen
million that would have happened after the period Germany would

(49:27):
have ran out of bullets without Fritz Haber. I mean,
that is just astonishing. Yeah, it is a tremendous amount
of of of human misery made possible by Fritz Haber's invention.
Um And while that's horrible for the world and horrible
for Europe and horrible for probably conservatively about fourteen to

(49:48):
sixteen million young men. It made Fritz Haber rich as
shit because if you guys remember, he's still getting that
ten percent commission and all of the sales the b
A s F makes from as discoveries, So ten percent
of every bullet fired by Germany and the greatest war
in history goes right into Fritz Haber's pocket. So he's
doing fucking great on this, on this thing. Like it's

(50:12):
a solid move. This makes me think a little bit
of the of the Purdue story we've been looking out
recently and family. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, I would say
I would. I think it's less evil than that because
Fritz didn't do this to get rich, that was a
side effect of it. He did it because he was
patriotic and his country was at war. Like it's one
of those things you can say there was this horrific

(50:33):
human toll to it, but also like, would any scientists
in America with the capability not have done the same
thing if it meant the survival of our country? The
country yea, or Britain. There's very little Yeah, I guess
there's very little patriotism involved in the development of opioids.
But yeah, exactly. But but at the same time, the
development of opioids was or ushered in a new wave

(50:57):
of pain management that this at least this country hadn't
really seen. Um yeah, at the expense of a number
of lives obviously, but yeah, and it's similar in that.
And it's certainly like anytime you're making millions of dollars
off of a war, it's pretty messed up. Well, there's
a conscience that is, yeah, overlooked. And that's the thing.

(51:21):
We'll talk about this a little bit more into actually
just a second here, but that's the thing that Einstein
fought with Fritz Haber over because Fritz was like, no,
it's my duty as a patriotic German to lend all
of my talents to this war effort. And Einstein was like, fun, countries,
they're dumb, You're getting people killed. And was he a
little bit of a self hating Jew possibly Haber Haber, No, Oh, no,

(51:44):
I wouldn't, or I guess he would. I guess he.
But obviously he was quite intoxicated with the fact that
he could be patriotic. Yeah. I think he was intoxicated
by that, and I think there was some subconscious desire
to prove himself. I don't think he thought very much
about like it just wasn't important to him, Like he
was a German and that's what he But I think

(52:05):
if you grow up ultimately being rejected because of your religion,
even if you're not conscious of it, that this sort
of allure of patriotism is there later in life. Oh
absolutely and it It definitely is. Also, like he got
rejected from being an officer in the military for being Jewish,

(52:25):
and like, now he's saved the whole war. So there's
there that's got to be playing a part in it.
It's like I wasn't good enough for your army. Well,
like what would your army be doing without Fritz fucking Habert.
It's not unlike yeah, um, like you're gonna imprison my dad,
so now I'm going to punish the whole country. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(52:45):
there's there's a little bit of that New Jersey little fairness.
Who among us hasn't wanted to punish New Jersey? That's
one time or another. Um, if you've ver seen Chris
Christie's plain outfit, he he is punishing New Jersey with

(53:06):
his sartorial style. Yea. Now, as the death toll rose
from the tens to the hundreds of thousands, and eventually
into the millions. The scientists of Europe began to debate
the ethics of lending their brilliance to the nation states
that mainly seem to want to use it to massacre
young men. On the other side, Habr's friend Einstein landed
on the side of don't do that. He called the

(53:27):
war madness, and he blamed German faith in the Kaiser
for causing it. For it's Haber on the other hand,
sign what came to be known as the Manifesto of
the Nine three was a document signed by ninety three
German thinkers and scientists justifying their participation in the war effort. Now,
the Manifesto justified Germany's legal occupation of neutral Belgium by

(53:48):
saying that Germany's enemies had quote incited Mongolians and Negros
against the White race, which you may notice is not
having anything to do with World War One. The Mongolians
coming from I don't know that one its sessed Kaiser
Wilhelm hated. He had this phrase the Yellow peril, and

(54:09):
there's largest things. Before World War One, he was obsessed
by the idea of Japan's tentacles reaching into Germany. I
have no idea why, but the Mongol the mong I
guess because of Um. And they were. I think to
a guy like Kaiser Wilhelm, anybody further into Asia than
Russia was a Mongolian like a Korean guy could have

(54:31):
said high to him and even like look at the
Mongol like he was he was super racist. It was
yeah uh and he was the Kaiser Um not a
New Yorkers feel about the Middle States. I think, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly,
and how everybody in the world feels about Texas. Yeah. Now.

(54:53):
According to the book Mastermind, quote, Einstein watched with fascination
and horror as fellow German scientists Heber and the Lead
laid their ski as at the altar of Germany's war efforts.
Our entire much play praised technological progress and civilization generally,
Einstein wrote in nineteen seventeen, could be compared to an
axe in the hand of a pathological criminal. His friend

(55:13):
Fritz Haber. Meanwhile, as historian Fritz Stern put it, began
to forge a more powerful ax. So Einstein's like, don't
let science be a weapon, and Fritz is like, I'm
gonna make science into the best fucking weapon anybody's ever seen.
That's that's the kind of dude he is, so most science.
I guess that's the point of this episode. Yeah, yeah,

(55:34):
that's that's that's definitely the point of this episode. He
doesn't he doesn't come across as great. Uh. You might think,
having made it possible for your country to fight the
war for three additional years and and literally saved the
war effort on your own, you might be content to
rest on your laurels if you were fritz Haber and
just sort of enjoy making the money and letting your

(55:57):
country pull both bullets and bread from the air. But
fritz Haber was not done serving his nation. Yeah, this
is this is he's about to put out his the chain,
Like if fritz Haber is Fleetwood mac, which, of course,
why wouldn't he be. Um So, fritz Haber looked out

(56:19):
at the killing field that machine guns and heavily artillery
had created, and he decided that what Germany needed to
in the war was what he called a higher form
of killing. Fritz Haber was about to invent chemical warfare. Now,
poison gas had been banned under the Hague Convention, but
all the major powers in World War One had at
least fiddled with the concept. Little attention had been devoted

(56:42):
to chemical weapons because they didn't seem to work very well.
Germany's very rudimentary program was run by a scientist who
had gotten the job because he was related to a
high ranking officer. The gases he used were ineffective, and
the artillery shells he tried to fire them with didn't
really work. The program was widely considered to be a
waste of money. It probably well, we would have died
on the vine if Fritz Haber hadn't decided that chemical

(57:03):
warfare was a fucking sweet idea. According to Smithsonian Magazine quote,
Haber had a difficult time finding any German army commanders
who would even agree to attest in the field. One
general called the use of poison gas unchivalrous. Another declared
that poisoning the enemy just as one poisons rats was repulsive,
but if it meant victory, that general was willing to

(57:23):
do what must be done. Haber, according to biographer Marghite
Sezzoli uh said, if you want to win the war,
then please wage chemical warfare with conviction. So Fritz Haber
is about to do just that, you know. And then
in the Second World War, the same logic was used
in terms of ending the war in Japan with Rushimir

(57:44):
and Nagasaki, and I think again looking into the futures,
were developing new kinds of um you know, computer programs
and and and cyber weapons. It doesn't take much encouragement
once you're in an arena of flick to say, let's
let the dogs out of the pound and see what happens.

(58:05):
And it's a it's a it's a mistake we repeated
twice in the twentieth century, and it's one I'm I'm
scattled in the century well, and it was. It was
even if you look at the creation of the gatling gun,
that was the same in the creation of dynamite. Like
both in both weapons, people were like, this is going
to make war too bad for people to wage. And

(58:25):
then a hundred and fifty years later, the descendant of
the gatling gun is one of the most popular products
in the United States. People are like so in love
with essentially like the most evolved form of the machine gun.
That like, it's an incredibly popular, multi hundred million dollar
industry because like it turns out that no weapon makes

(58:46):
war too terrible to uh to fight. We just wind
up kind of worshiping the weapons because that's what people do, uh,
which is not an optimistic line to go to an
ad plug on. But maybe it'll be a weapons company.
Maybe Raytheon. We'll we'll be we'll be sponsoring the next AD.
I know a lot of my listeners need to buy

(59:08):
guided missiles h for the wars that they wage in Yemen.
A lot of our listeners are are waging violent conflicts
in the Middle East and North Africa. We have a
lot of a lot of a lot of generals and
dictators fans the podcast, So hopefully it's a Raytheon ad.
Here we go, We're back. We're back, and we're talking

(59:35):
about Fritz Haber's obsessive desire to have chemical warfare become
a thing. Now, there was a lot of resistance Fritz
encountered to the idea of using chemical weapons, even from
the German General staff, as we already discussed. Fritz, however,
did not understand the horror that people had for these tools,

(59:55):
saying death is death, however it is inflicted, which is
not wrong, but kind of misses the point a little bit. Um.
He was eventually successful in convincing the German general staff
to let him create a chemical weapons corps. Fritz and
his scientists set out immediately to find a chemical that
would work for killing. This was not an entirely safe process,

(01:00:16):
according to the biography Mastermind quote. On December seventeen, Fritz
Haber stood nearby as two of his oldest friends at
the Institute, Gerhard Justin Auto Sacker, prepared to mix two
such chemicals in a test tube. Then someone called from
next door he was needed in the mechanic shop. Moments
after Haber left the room, the test tube erupted in
a violent explosion, and the laboratory was splattered with blood.

(01:00:37):
The blast blew off Just's hand, but he would survive. Sacker,
who had been looking directly at the mixture, lay dying
horribly mutilated. Haber came rushing back into the laboratory and,
according to one account, collapsed in shock. Speechless. Held in
a colleague's arms, he could only shake his head, as
though refusing to believe the scene before him. Clara Haber
also came running. She too, knew soccer well long ago.

(01:01:00):
Oh in Breslau, he had been one of two students
who tested her knowledge During the public awarding of her
doctoral degree in chemistry, Clara proved to be very calm
and courageous in the midst of crisis, ordering the institute's
mechanic to cut open Soccer's collar so that he might
breathe more easily. So Haber starts making these weapons. They
blow up and kill one of his friends. He passes
out in horror. His wife immediately runs in and starts

(01:01:22):
doing first aid and like knows what ship needs to happen.
So so there's an explosion, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, the
one I think about chemical wolf fare andwell, but want
I think about poison gas, which is not explosive, right,
some of them are like the chemicals that you mix
can be explosive, Like they hadn't figured out the mixture
yet and they were kind of sucking around and yeah yeah.

(01:01:43):
So Soccer did not survive his injuries, and Clara came
to be revolted by her husband's work in weapons development.
She called it a perversion of science and quote a
sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to
bring new insights into life. Haber, however, was not at
all just ated from chemical warfare by this deadly disaster
or by his wife. Next, he had the brilliant idea

(01:02:05):
to use chlorine gas as a weapon, mainly because it
was easy and cheap to make. In quantity, he only
really needed salt, so since artillery shells were in short supply,
he decided to use some of the tens of thousands
of empty metal canisters that were normally used to ship paint.
He theorized that these canisters could be filled with liquid
chlorine and placed all along the front in strategic locations.

(01:02:26):
When opened, the chlorine would vaporize into gas and the
wind would blow it into enemy trenches. Chlorine gas is
heavier than air, so once it reached the trenches, it
would go down into them, rendering the safest spots on
the battlefield uninhabitable. It's kind of genius when you think
about it, Like, he's not a dumb guy. It's a
good it's a good plan. It worked. It's pretty horrifying.
So you would leave paint cans. He really used paint

(01:02:49):
can Yeah, yeah, big paint not like what we recognize
as modern paint cans, but like these big industrial paint canisters. Yeah,
and they would bury them in thousands of them and
then open the ops. Isn't there a famous phrase, be
careful what expression you make, because the wind might change.
I've never heard that one, I think, so, I think

(01:03:10):
I think my in England, I seem to remember my
parents saying like, don't make too many hideous faces because
the wind might change. But I mean, I would say,
opening a bunch of paint cans full of deadly choking
gas and next to where my soldiers were camping might
give me pause. Yeah, it's uh, there's some danger in it.
It's not, it's not, I mean, but it's the same thing.

(01:03:32):
You talked to any any soldier who was in a
frontline position when artillery was firing, and they will tell
you that ship often winds up hitting way too close
to so do air strikes. So like, there's always risks
with this stuff. Um, and it was considered a worthwhile risk.
So Fritz spent months training a special core of citizen
soldiers or if scientists, soldiers whose job would be the place,

(01:03:55):
and employed the new chemical munitions. They buried six thousand
canisters around the stalemated battlefield of Libra and then settled
in to wait for the wind to be right. One
fine evening in April two fifteen or nineteen fifteen, not two.
It was Fritz Haber, leading his chemical core from the front,
gave the order to deploy poison gas for the first

(01:04:17):
time in warfare. He started the attack with the words
God punish England. A cloud of sickly yellow gas drifted
towards the Allied lines, filled with soldiers who had barely
gotten used to the idea of machine guns. The gas
caused mass panic lance. Sergeant Elmer Cotton, a Canadian who
was gassed at Ipra, called the chlorine gas poisoning an

(01:04:38):
equivalent death to drowning only on dried land. The effects
are there, a splitting headache and a terrific thirst to
drink water is instant death, a knife edge of pain
and the lungs and the coughing up of a greenish
froth off the stomach and the lungs ending finally an
insensibility and death. It is a fiendish way to die.
Do you think he had tested the react action on well,

(01:05:02):
I guess he had seen his friend die. He saw
his friend die, he knew it killed. But I'm always
curious about that. You just sort of it's like black.
I mean, did I did he know the method of
killing that the way in which people would die when
he implemented it. What he knew is what would happen chemically,
and what happened chemically when the body. Yeah, what happens
chemically with chlorine gas is that when it enters your airway,

(01:05:26):
it reacts with the water in your like throat and
lungs to produce hydrochloric acid, So it literally melts its
victims from the inside out. Now, the hundred and sixty
eight tons of gas that Haber's men released killed five
thousand Allied soldiers in a matter of minutes and horribly
wounded another ten thousand. It opened up a gap in

(01:05:47):
the Allied lines that allowed the German army to advance
more than a mile, which in World War One terms,
was an enormous gain for that point in the fighting.
Haber was quickly promoted to the rank of captain. He
had finally achieved his lifelong goal of becoming a German officer,
at the small cost of introducing a fresh new hell
into the annals of human warfare. Cool. It's proud of him,

(01:06:10):
proud of him. I'm horrified and yeah, you know, unfortunately,
Haber's destructive invention is very much with us today in Syria.
I mean, yeah, it's been used within days of us
recording this podcast in Syria and it lib Yeah. I
mean you see these videos of these children in Syria

(01:06:30):
choking with their parents around them, and it's so very,
very horrific, and and it's such an effective tool that
that that Fritz Haber made. It's hard to imagine a
time when it wouldn't be with us in the future,
given how destructive it is both of life but also
to morale. And what a what a disgusting way to

(01:06:53):
see somebody go, somebody you love, somebody fighting next to you.
I mean it really, I mean it opens the bowels
of hell into the world. Yeah, that's a really good
way to describe what he did. It's like he found
a way to create a portal into hell in a
place that was already hell and make it just that
much worse. Um, it's pretty shocking. I've talked to some

(01:07:14):
people who have been gassed with chlorine, some Golden Division
soldiers in Mosele who got because isis deployed some color
Because it's very easy to make chlorine gas so these
guys had gotten gassed and survived, but like, um, it's
one of those things. Even if you're a really hardened
veteran and you've been through some ship, there's something about

(01:07:35):
chemical weapons that is just unmanning, which is a term
you'll hear a lot from soldiers in World War One
about their reaction to the gas that like people who
could hold up under shell fire and machine gun fire
would just psychologically break um, because it's just it's such
a fucking nightmare which shakes you to your foundation. Very

(01:07:56):
a you breathe has been turned into poison. It's not
like there's something as a bullet coming at your shell,
coming at your it's it's it's literally this thing around
you which is overwhelming and I can't I'm feeling uncomfortable
just just thinking about. I mean, the drowning I think
is probably exactly the right the metaphor of that drowning. Yeah. Now, uh,

(01:08:19):
y'all aren't the only people who are horrified by what
Fritz Saber had done. On May second, ninet, a couple
of days after deploying chemical weapons for the first time,
he returned home to Berlin to attend a giant party
that was being thrown to celebrate his victory and his
commission as an officer. His wife Clara was there, and
she was furious with him. She thought that his work

(01:08:40):
was barbaric and that the thousands of dead men simply
proved to her that her husband was on the wrong
side of history. Now it's unclear, but there's also some
evidence that Clara had caught Fritz cheating on her around
this time. We don't know exactly what happened, but we
know they had a giant fight when he returned home. Uh,
and whatever went down in that fight, we know that
after Fritz went to bed, Clara grabbed his service revolver,

(01:09:03):
fired one test shot into the air, and then shot
herself through the heart. Yeah. Yeah, she killed herself. Um,
probably largely due to the chemical weapons thing, which you know,
an understandable reaction to your husband inventing chemical warfare. M. Yeah,

(01:09:26):
I I would say, UM, I can see that breaking someone,
especially someone who's been through as much as she has,
Like kind of hard to imagine ever being okay with that. Um.
And you can't really divorce in n Berlin. What do
you do? How do you how do you let him
know how fucked up. What he's done is that's what

(01:09:49):
this is what Clara chose to do. Now, she left
behind a suicide note we don't know what it said
because Fritz had hit hidden and probably destroyed. Um. But
the day after her suicide he left for the Eastern Front,
leaving their preadolescent son with her body to deal with
the fallout. So again, Dad of the year, does anyone know?
Does this? Is there an account of the sun after

(01:10:11):
he killed himself? Yeah, he killed himself as an adult,
but he didn't live very long. Yeah. This he found
her body to like, it's Fritz's it's he was super fucked. Um. Yeah,
it's horrible. It's a horrible tale. That's a really story.
Not a lot, not a lot of living the longest.

(01:10:33):
I'm assuming not of his whole family, but I mean
of his son and daughter and wife. No, No, he
his son outlives much, not by much. Um. Now, under
his direction, Fritz's direction, the German chemical warfare Core developed
several new species of poison gas during the war, including
phosgene gas and the now infamous mustard gas, which is

(01:10:55):
even worse than the first gas. He had deployed hundreds
of thousands of men were killed and injured by poison
gas over the course of the long and brutal war,
Somewhere around seven hundred thousand total casualties as a result
of gas. Did it spark the British and the other Yeah,
and and again as sort of evidence of how shitty

(01:11:15):
kind to everyone is general. I think David French, the
leader of the British Expeditionary Force at the time, when
he hears that poison gas has been deployed, first thing
he says is like, this is horrible and completely uncivilized
and nightmarish. And then the next day is sends back
home to say we need to make chemical weapons and
start doing the same thing technology company escalation. Yeah, that

(01:11:38):
is so fucked up. We're going to do the same thing,
but like, fuck you for doing that. Yeah, we're not
very good as humans at putting Pandora's ship back in
the book. So we're just the No, we just keep
we make more boxes. We're like, that's a fucking sweet box.
I'm gonna get me a box like that. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:12:00):
that's kind of the history of war. Uh So, World
War One didn't go great for Germany, didn't really go
great for anybody except the United States kinda kind of
went awesome for us. Actually, when that was a transition
from that the sun never setting on the British Empire
to the beginning of the American Empire. Really yeah, yeah,
it really was. Um And on the subject of war, profittyers,

(01:12:22):
I think you can probably. I had lunch with a
Chinese friend yesterday and he said that in China, Dick
Cheney is one of the great heroes of China because
his oil interress uh, driving the Iraq War when America
could otherwise have been focused on constraining China. He thinks
of opened the twenty one century to be China Century. Well,

(01:12:47):
thank you, Dick Cheney. I mean, yeah, probably, there's so
many other reasons to be angry at Dick Cheney. I'm
not going to pick economic ones. But yeah, that's that
seems like an accurate summation of events. UM. So, World
War One not a great time for most people. Uh.
Fritz Haber, however, would later recall the Great War is

(01:13:08):
probably the best time in his life. Afterwards, he told
a friend, I was one of the mightiest men in Germany.
I was more than a great army commander, more than
a captain of industry. I was the founder of industries.
My work was essential for the economic and military expansion
of Germany. All doors were open to me now full

(01:13:28):
time for Fritz. The British chemist J. E. Coates, who
was friends with Fritz, wrote in nineteen thirty seven that
quote the war years were for Haber the greatest period
of his life. And then he lived and worked on
a scale and for a purpose that satisfied his strong
or urge towards great, dramatic, vital things to be a
great soldier, to obey and be obeyed. That is his

(01:13:48):
closest friends knew was a deep seated ideal. Can I
ask you a naive question, Yeah, why do you need
all kinds of different poison guesses? Why Why isn't just
the first horrible clorine enough? Well, you know, you make
a horrible poison gas, and then people make gas masks,
so then you've got to make a new gas that
eats through the old gas mask. And like like it's
this this, and also like can we kill more people?

(01:14:10):
Can we make one that spreads better? Like it's like
a generative adversarial network. It's like you, Oh, he wants
me to explain why it's like a generative adversarial network,
because once you develop a gas and then there's a
gas mask, you need a new gas that's going to
break through that gas mask, and then there's just going
to be another gas mask and there's another gas that

(01:14:32):
breaks through that gas mask. And that's basically how you
train an algorithm. That's how you We even see evidence
of that in nature outside of human beings. I think
the Red Queen hypothesis is the is the name that
they give for it. And like when you look at
sort of chemical warfare between plants, how like one plant
will develop, will evolve like a set of oils that

(01:14:56):
it releases that like attract bugs that help it or
at tracked like even that like can spread and like
warn other plants in the grove that like zebras or
whatever are coming to eat it, and then other plants
in that grow will start producing poison so that like
too many of their leaves don't get eaten um. And
it's called the red Queen hypro pothesis from like a

(01:15:16):
lion in Alice in Wonderland, where you have to keep
running as fast as you can in order to stay
in place. So it's this thing that happens all throughout
nature like animals are constantly like that's nature, read and
truth and claw. They're always evolving and changing to get
an edge. And we do the same thing with guns
and ship and that's what we're looking at in sleep
Walkers as well. Is one of the big breakthroughs and

(01:15:38):
artificial intelligence currently has been this UM what Kara is
talking about, generative adversarial network. So that's when you put
two neural networks against each other and you have neural
network one trying to trick neural network to until the
output of neural network one is as close as possible
to perfect. So that's how for example, Alpha Go, the

(01:15:59):
chess program uh not only beat the best human player,
but beat the very best human programmed chess program, which
was called stock Fish. So um, Stockfish had learned the
history of every human game ever and the rules of
chess and could handily beat any any human chess player.
And then Alpha Go came along and all they did
was teached. They told two algorithms to play chess against

(01:16:21):
each other for a couple of hours. They played ten
million trillion games of chess in two hours, learning from
each other all the time, and then within half a day,
they blew out of the water the previous best chess program.
So it's interesting, you know, the nature of conflict, whether
it's in the battlefield, whether it's between plants in nature
or now, whether it's between computer algorithms, is all about

(01:16:43):
this red queen hypothesis or you know, trying to beat
each other and continually improve iteration. And and that's also
something I celebrated instead of can value right, its rated design,
whatever you call it. And I guess one of the
few things that gives me hope about the future is
how bad a lot of these systems still are and
a lot of what they do. Like you can talk
like these algorithms are so advanced, Ay is getting so advanced.

(01:17:04):
Facebook still can't ban the Nazis, like it can't it
can't identify a lot of the equipment that like, And
I guess I'm like that part is not so optimistic.
But like you talk to soldiers and stuff about like
these incredibly advanced quarter of a million dollar weapons systems,
they're like, no, a lot of them are total ship
and it doesn't work half the time, and you wind
up just like throwing rocks or whatever, because like your

(01:17:26):
big missiles not not functioning or like like as as
as fancy. I don't know. I I take some hope
in the fact that things still funk up no matter
how they represent the people who create them. That's why,
I mean, especially in the case of Facebook. But yeah, yeah,
it's it's bad, and it's also maybe what will save

(01:17:46):
us from uh, all of these things that we keep
building or it'll kill us. Well, humanity will probably save us.
Humanity will probably save humanity and its shortcomings, not in
how not in how it bands to is. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's probably fair. So uh. The years after

(01:18:07):
World War One were a steady downward slide for Fritz.
He had always battled with nerves, some as the result
of his workaholic schedule, and some surely due to his
sense of guilt over his wife's suicide and all the
things he saw during the war. His health suffered, and
as Weimar Germany gave way to the Third Reich, so
did his career. Fritz slowly came to realize that the
Germany that he had loved and served so well felt

(01:18:29):
it owed him nothing. One by one, Fritz's political allies
and business partners abandoned him as Germany's laws became more
restrictive for Jewish people, he wound up yeah, exactly. None
of what he had done for Germany uh earned him
any loyalty from the new government. He wound up fleeing
the country and bouncing around Western Europe, living out of
hotels as his health gradually failed him. He died in

(01:18:52):
nineteen thirty four, miserable, nearly penniless, and knowing that his
nation had completely abandoned him due to his Jewish blood.
And was he I mean so around the same time
Freud left Vienna for example, what was he part of
a community of situations sellectual people in exile? It was
he also exiled from that community because of what he

(01:19:13):
had done in terms of the poison guess you know.
Oddly enough, most of his he stayed good friends with
Einstein his whole life, and he was very like his
scientist friends really liked him. He's supposed to be very generous.
He's he would was very generous with his money to
his friends and stuff over the years. But um, his
best friends as an older man were French and British
chemical weapons experts who had been on the other side

(01:19:35):
of the war from him. So all these guys who
had made that sort of their their career, like they
all got along, um became identity. I guess he didn't
really have one. Um. There was a period of time
where he was considering going to Palestine to like help
start a university down there, but like his health wouldn't
really allow it, and he couldn't formally immigrate away from

(01:19:58):
Germany without having up a bunch of his money and
taxes because of some laws that the Germans had placed
on Jewish people who are trying to leave. So he
just kind of got locked in a holding pattern until
he died. So Einstein ended up being right that oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
your patriotism means nothing. It will because your country will

(01:20:20):
turn yeah yeah in a dime. Don't trust countries. Yeah,
Einstein was the smarter man um, or at least the
man who understood human nature better. That might be more
accurate to say, um, which is probably why Einstein is
more widely No, yeah, that's probably a big part of it. Well,
and I will say uh, Einstein saved Fritz's family. His

(01:20:43):
children and his immediate family were rescued from Germany due
to Albert Einstein, like putting in a word for them
with the US government basically like smoothing that all over.
So Einstein was a very good friend to his friend
even after his death. So you'd say that for Albert
and the well, I guess the US government couldn't fall
to a children Fritz's children, Yeah, yeah, I mean how

(01:21:03):
could you? And also like by this point the US
government was making shiploads of bombs and fertilizer using the
haber Bosch process, Like it's not it's yeah, he was
a net good to the US. We didn't lose all
that many guys in that war. And by the way,
the US took in a bunch of Nazi scientists after
the end of the Second World War two War Soviet
So when it when it comes to bad scientists, if
they can serve the US national interest, I don't think

(01:21:24):
it doesn't. Yeah, we didn't have any issue with Werner
von Brown, even after he reigned a whole bunch of
rockets down on London. We were we were fine with Werner.
We'd probably hire a lot of ex Huawei guys if
they were we take him. Yeah. Sure. All we care
about is that you can do the thing right. Um. Now,
while Fritz's immediate family was saved by the Nazi death

(01:21:49):
were saved from the Nazi death machine. Most of his
extended family were murdered in the death camps. And the
final terrible irony of fritz Haber's life is that the
chemical weapon used to kill so many millions of his
fellow Jews, Cyclon B, was the descendant of the life's
disinfect in zy Clon, which was developed by fritz Haber's
own lab and by scientists that he was managing. So

(01:22:11):
that is the last terrible part of this story. He
doesn't not remind me of Bernie made off, just in
terms of as a Jewish person who basically was selling
dreams to middle and upper middle class Jewish people and
organizations that were supposed to raise money for a number

(01:22:32):
of Jewish causes, and including someone like l y z
L who then ended up disenfranchising so many important post
war Jewish organizations, foundations, people who had fled Germany during
the Second World War, all because he wanted to be
taken seriously in a financial industry that in the seventies
and eighties was extremely anti Semitic. Um you know, using

(01:22:57):
I guess money instead of chemical war fair, but yeah,
it was intoxicated by it. Nonetheless, Yeah, a lot of
the same psychological stuff going on. Yes, I mean not this, Yeah,
ton't kill anybody, but no, yeah, but yeah, I would
say Habrew definitely had the more negative impact. Definitely. Actually
is this is where we get into the difficulty of

(01:23:19):
Fritz Haber's legacy, um because he's the father of chemical warfare,
and he invented the zyclon chemical that was used to
feel so much of the Holocaust. But can we blame
him for inventing the zyclon chemic? I mean that feels
like we've given we given Fritz a good and well
as I've beating in this show. But I mean you don't.

(01:23:41):
You can't control the future what happens to your inventions.
And that's another big point in our podcast and Sleepwalkers,
which is, you know, technology is neutral. I mean, he's
not neutral, but you build an algorithm, when you build
an application, you can't control what it's used for. So Google,
for example, recently withdrew from Project Maven and the Pentagon.
But the point is when you're do out it being
algorithms and artificially intelligence, it gets out into the wild.

(01:24:04):
You don't get to say how it's used. Shakespeare doesn't
get to say this is how you read Hamlet. And
I don't think it's fair to say that Fritz is
to blame for the use of cyclon be in in
the Second World War. You're absolutely right, Um. And it's
also like, if you've got the stuff you can clearly
blame him for is like chemical weapons development, um, allowing

(01:24:25):
Germany to exist in World War One for an extra
three years. Like, those are things where he knew what
he was doing very clearly. Zycoloni was just trying to
make a good way to clean up lice, which is
a pretty reasonable thing to want as a scientist. Um.
In his like his legacy is complicated also by the

(01:24:45):
fact that most scientists agree that between two and four
billion human beings are alive right now because of the
haber Bosch process. Um. The Again, it's not like they
otherwise would be dead. They have been although a lot
of people would have died because there would have been
mass famine in particularly in Asia, um in Mongolia, in

(01:25:09):
the Mongols, all of the Mongols, all of the Mongols
would have had real, real food troubles, you know. But
it does raise to be an interesting point, which is
that the whole if you're trained as a scientist, and
this is still the case today, you know your very
results focused. If you if you can make something more
efficient as an engineer or a scientist, like you've done
a good job. And that's that's been the logic of
science always, and it's very hard I think for for

(01:25:31):
scientists to step back and say I'm not going to
invent that thing because a it's counter to the training,
counters the institution of science, but also like it's a
small world of very competitive people. I mean, as you said,
Fritz Haber was trained by Bunsen, hanging out with Einstein.
You know that all these other scientists they want to
naturally they have this sort of competitive instinct, and it's
it's really hard I think also for AI scientists today

(01:25:53):
or AI engineers who think like should I not make
that thing because I know if I don't, someone else will. Well,
especially now with technology companies where you're also incentivized by
huge amounts of money. I mean, just the sort of
allure of being a unicorn um is so intoxicating. I
think that it seems like a lot of the time
it's like I don't think Mark Zuckerberg, what did Chris

(01:26:16):
Hugh say. He was like, we didn't know that we
were going to create this kind of platform. We didn't
even think about it at the time. They were, you know,
sophomores at Harvard. So no, I mean, he wanted to
rate whether which girls he thought was hottest. Literally what
he was going for. I mean, and again it's not
sort of I wouldn't, right, but I mean, at the
same time, you know, the ability to broadcast, um, an

(01:26:40):
act of domestic terror on a place that was created
so that you could see how many hot girls went
to Dartmouth. You know, it's it wasn't It wasn't their
intention to create a platform for hate speech. It's my point, um,
but it happened. And Uh, part of what we're going
to talk about in the last part of this episode

(01:27:00):
is what happened with fritz Haber's invention, because obviously chemical
weapons are still being used, the haber Bosch process is
still being used. Um, but there are some things that
have happened as a result of the haber Bosch process
that Fritz Haber could never have been guessed, but we
still have to live with. I found an article on

(01:27:21):
a website called The Globalist that both declares Fritz the
greatest industrial chemist who ever lived um but also notes
this quote the transformation of Asia and the emergence of
China and India as giant modern first century global economies
would never have been possible without Norman Borlog's miracle rice strains,
but they could never have been grown had Haber not

(01:27:42):
extracted bread from air. As his fellow Nobel laureate Maxwell
now put it, Borlog's miracle strains of rice and grain
require exceptionally vast inputs of the nitrate fertilizer that is
still made from the process Fritz Haber discovered. These fertilizers
also require enormous inputs of oil. This means the dream
of an oil free world can never happen. Even if eternal,

(01:28:02):
ever renewable free energy could be harvest harvested from the
sun or cosmic currents of space, a world of seven
billion people would still be desperately dependent on oil to
make the nitrate fertilizer and to grow the crops those
people need to survive. The twenty first century, like the
twenty century, therefore, will still be Fritz Haber's world. So

(01:28:23):
we are eternally dependent on oil as a result of
the haber Bosch process. And there's more. I'm gonna quote
next from So during World War One, Germany topped out
something like a hundred thousand tons of nitrogen per year
using the haber Bosh method. Uh. Worldwide, we currently extract

(01:28:43):
something like a hundred million tons of nitrogen out of
the atmosphere every year UM. And this has had a
profound impact on our biosphere. I'm gonna quote now from
that biography mastermind quote leftover. Fertilizer is slowly killing streams, lakes,
and coastal eco systems across the Northern Hemisphere. The changes
are gradual, taking place over decades, so it takes a

(01:29:04):
patient it'da notice. Long term studies, however, revealed dramatic changes.
Fifty years ago. For instance, eel grass covered most of
the Wauqua Bay and Massachusetts. Then came suburban development nearby.
Human sewage containing nitrogen from food taken from a thousand fields,
leached into the bay and increase in quantities. Thick beds
of seaweed began to grow, crowding out the eel grass

(01:29:24):
and with it an entire web of natural life from
scallops to small fish. When nitrogen oxides in the air
come into contact with droplets of watering the clouds nitric
acid forms, it returns to the earth as acid rain,
destroying forests and poisoning streams. At the same time, nitrogen
rich rainfall also fertilizes the land, even land that doesn't
need or want fertilizer. Every acre of the Netherlands, whether

(01:29:46):
field or forest, now receives as much nitrogen from rainwater
as North American farmers typically apply to their wheat fields
on purpose. It is much more than most African farmers
could dream of buying. Even smaller doses are enough to
play ecological have In forests and wild grasslands, plant species
that thrive in the presence of nitrogen start growing uncontrollably,
crowding out other plants and even animals that aren't used

(01:30:09):
to such conditions. The result is a depleted ecosystem supporting
a less rich and complex web of life. And that, too,
is the world that Fritz Haber has left us so complicated. Guy, Yeah, wow,
that's really that's super super interesting. I guess when did

(01:30:29):
we start to realize how how the presence of fertilizer
throughout the ecosystem was such a such a such a
terrible cost and burden to the earth. Was that like
a seventies discovery, I mean, don't I don't know when.
I feel like that's when it started, and I don't
think we've really got a great handle on it until
in the last like twenty or thirty years that like

(01:30:50):
on a wide scale scientist start to realize like, oh, ship,
this is a problem. Like, yeah, we've got some issues here, guys,
um and we're sort of Dylan Net. Oh ship, this
is a problem, but we don't really know what to
do stage of it. So well. Tom Friedman, the New
York Times columnist who previously wrote a very good book

(01:31:12):
in the in the nineties called From Beirut to Jerusalem
The History of the Middle East, is very interested in
climate change, and he traces the origins of the Syrian
Civil War back to famine, otherwhile the rising climate change
and the rising price of wheat which sparked the first
protests against as Sad. So the wheel comes full circle
in Syria with the civil war kicked off by wheat

(01:31:35):
prices and prosecuted using chemical gases. Yep, thanks for its Yeah, wow, yeah,
what a mess. Well, that's the episode. That's what I've got.
You guys wanna want to plug your your plug doubles

(01:31:57):
as we as we lead ourselves out. Yeah, so uh
care again. We'd love for you guys to check out
Sleepwalker's podcast, which covers really all things AI, all the
human touch points, healthcare, agriculture, love, creativity, yeah, food, and

(01:32:17):
Sleepwalkers is not quite as bleak as today's story. Um
we look at some of the positive potential of new
technology as well. I mean, much like Fritz's Fritze's dual
use career, which which launched both poisonous gases and fertilizers
which fed the world albeit and are now poisoning the world. Um.
AI technology which we talk about in Sleepwalkers has profound

(01:32:39):
potential to change our lives the better. Is already doing
so in terms of diagnostics, in terms of you know,
the ability, for example, of journalists look through things like
the Panama papers and identify bad actors because the power
of data processing is so much better. Um. At the
same time, you know, these technologies without careful thought and

(01:33:00):
constraint can push us into into into really hellish outcomes.
And so you know, we still live in a country
which is democratic, and we can, through our votes at
the ballot box and through public agitation, have some role
in our own future. And so you know, we we
think it's important to talk about potential bad outcomes because

(01:33:21):
if we if we wake up and and take action,
we can perhaps you know, ensure a more safe and
uncomfortable future for ourselves. Yeah. That's uh. That's the optimistic
uh point of view, and I like ending on the
optimistic point of view, even though my episodes barely inspire
much optimism of people. So um, try to take that

(01:33:43):
to heart listeners and visit our website behind the Bastards
dot com. Find us on Twitter and Instagram at their
Bastards pod. You can find me on Twitter and I
right okay, and uh. You can buy shirts on Tea
Public that have funny drawings and Googles on them, cups
and such. That's that's it. That's all I got. That's
all I got for plugs at the end of the episode.

(01:34:06):
So uh, go home, enjoy some very nitrogen rich food
because everything you eat is filled with nitrogen thanks to
frit saber Um. Maybe enjoy some explosives or chlorine gas.
Don't enjoy some chlorine games, hug a cat or something.
Uh and uh yeah, I have a good debt. That's it.

(01:34:29):
That's the episode.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Fritz Haber: The Man Who Invented Chemical Warfare