Fritz Haber 1. The Spirit of the Times.
I just finished the first of three volumes of a graphic novel biography of the German Jewish chemist Fritz Haber. He is a Nobel laureate and a German patriot who died in exile just after Hitler took power.
He invented the process for taking nitrogen from the air and making fertilizer. We would not have a world population of seven billion now without Haber. Not a quarter of that. But that invention also meant Germany could fight for four years in World War I instead of running out of gunpowder in the first six months.
Billions fed, millions dead.
This first volume traces Haber's life until the first decade of the 20th Century. The great and the terrible years are in the next two volumes.
A short biography of Haber is below in an article I wrote for Chemical Engineering Progress magazine in 2004.
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First three books of 2022:
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
Marie Curie by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)
The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche
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