Background
Fritz was born in Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland), the son of a local alderman and successful chemical and dye merchant. His family was one of the oldest families of that town.
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1905
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1953
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2012
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2013
Fritz was born in Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland), the son of a local alderman and successful chemical and dye merchant. His family was one of the oldest families of that town.
After receiving a classical education at St. Elizabeth classical school, Fritz obtained his father's permission to study chemistry, at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (today the Humboldt University of Berlin). He left the university and arranged to attend the Heidelberg University, where he earned his doctorate in 1891. In 1887 Haber also enrolled at the Technical College of Charlottenburg (today the Technical University of Berlin), which he left to perform a legally required year of voluntary service in the Sixth Field Artillery Regiment in 1889.
In 1906 Haber was appointed professor of physical and electrochemistry at Karlsruhe. Between 1911 and 1933 he was the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin.
Haber’s scientific work involved the study of carbon bonding, which led to a chemical law that bears his name. In 1904 he developed the Haber process for the industrial development of ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. In 1909 he produced a glass electrode for the measurement of acidity of a solution. He also researched thermodynamic gas reactions.
During World War I the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was turned over to the war effort and in 1915 Haber was responsible for the German development and direction of the development and use of chlorine and mustard gases. Although during the war the Haber process was important for the production of the nitrates needed in explosives, after the war it became important in the development of fixed nitrogen for fertilizers.
In the 1920s Haber was the leading chemist in Germany, which had become the world center of physical chemistry. He was elected chairman of the German Chemical Society and created the Verband deutscher chemische Vereinc. His publications included The Theoretical Basis of Technical Electrochemistry (1892), and Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions (1905).
After World War I, Haber had returned to and reconstituted the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. A great German patriot when Germany was faced with paying reparations, he tried to extract gold from seawater. He rejected his Jewish origins and left the faith, an action which saved him from direct Nazi oppression, but when, in 1933, the Nazis demanded the dismissal of all Jews on his staff at the institute, he refused and resigned as director. In 1933 he fled to a sanatorium in Switzerland because of progressive ill health and died in Basle.
During his career Haber was also a contributor to journals and periodicals, including Berichte der Deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft, Berichte der Deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft, and Zeitschrift fur angewandle Chemie und Zentralblatt fur technische Chemie.
Haber invented the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas.
Haber is also considered the first chemist who developed and weaponized chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres.
Fritz established the Japan Institute in Tokyo and Berlin to promote mutual understanding between the two countries.
Theoretical Basis of Technical Electrochemistry
1892
HABER AND WEIZMANN
In his Trial and Error, Chaim Weizmann relates how he initially resented Haber because of his conversion to Christianity and attempt in 1921 to dissuade Einstein from joining Weizmann on a Zionist mission. When Haber had to leave Berlin in 1933 he went for a time to London where Weizmann tried to help him and suggested he move to Palestine. In the course of that year, the Zionist Congress was being held in Prague and Weizmann refused to attend for political reasons. While dining with Haber, urgent telephone calls came requesting him to come to Prague. Haber reacted by saying to Weizmann:
Dr. Weizmann, 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. But the position which I occupied then, glamorous as it may have seemed, is as nothing compared with yours. You are not creating out of plenty — you are creating out of nothing in a land that lacks everything. And you are. I think, succeeding. At the end of my life I find myself a bankrupt. W'hen I am gone and forgotten your work will stand, a shining monument in the long history of our people. Do not ignore the call — go to Prague.
Haber married Clara Immerwahr in 1901. They had a son Hermann, who was born in 1902. Twelve years later she committed suicide. Haber married his second wife, Charlotte Nathan, in 1917. The couple had two children, Eva-Charlotte and Ludwig-Fritz. Like Haber, both of his wives had been Jewish-born converts to Christianity.
Fritz lost his mother, Paula Haber, three weeks after his birth.
She was the first woman to earn her PhD in Germany, and was an active women's rights activist. She was married to fellow chemist Fritz Haber.
