Nitro Explosion: Thomas Hager on 'The Alchemy of Air'

HOW DO YOU make a book about the process of turning atmospheric nitrogen into fixed nitrogen interesting, even relevant?

"The one thing that I say that gets people interested in this book — because, as you know, it involves some rather significant technological and chemical history — is I ask them to name a discovery that's keeping 2.5 billion people alive that has nothing to do with medicine," said author Thomas Hager.

"Nobody can think of the answer. Nobody can believe there's a single invention that's keeping that many people alive."

In Hager's new book, "The Alchemy of Air," he explains how the discovery of how to transform airborne nitrogen into ammonia led to both the manufacture of synthetic fertilizer — saving billions of lives — and the production of gunpowder and explosives, which killed millions during World War I and II.

"I would say that it is arguably the world's most important discovery," Hager said emphatically. "I carefully use the words 'most important' rather than 'greatest' because 'most important' I define in terms of having the greatest immediate real world effect on the most people possible. It's hard to imagine a single discovery that could have a life and death meaning for 40 percent of the people on earth, and that's what this discovery is about."

In England and most of Europe in the late 19th century, starvation was far from anyone's mind. Yet, as population increased, food production increased at a significantly slower pace. While agriculture was going strong, fertilizer was imported from halfway around the world — first, from Peru and then from Chile.

In 1898, at the inaugural speech of Sir William Crookes, incoming president of the British Academy of Sciences, Crookes made the startling and alarming prediction that without the development of synthetic fertilizer, the world would begin to starve to death.

Hager stumbled across the little-discussed discovery while researching his previous book, "The Demon Under the Microscope," which was about the creation of the first antibiotic, developed by the German firm IG Farben.

"I learned about IG Farben being run by a guy called Carl Bosch, and there were all these hushed rumors about [him]. I'm trying to find out more about him and basically, I was reading everything I could about Carl Bosch," Hager explained.

"There's never been a biography of him in the English language. He was an industrialist who ranked up there with the Rockefellers and Carnegie and so on. He was one of the most powerful men in business at the time and hardly anything was available about him in English.

"I naturally became interested in finding out more, and this story emerged about how he became this powerful industrialist and the tragedy of his life — he became an alcoholic and he was an anti-Nazi but his company was taken over by the Nazis."

While World War II has, of course, changed the course of history, the use of the process to create synthetic fertilizer remains tied to the modern standard of living — and not just because of its ability to keep two billion people alive.

As Hager explained, the current threat of nitrogen pollution was not something he was aware of when he began his research. "I was writing a book of history," he said with a laugh, "and so I devoted only a chapter of the book to the question of the effects of the discovery today."

The last chapter of "The Alchemy of Air" looks at the effects of excess nitrogen on the biosphere, taking into account health problems in humans, "dead zones" created in oceans because of low oxygen levels and the nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas — released into the atmosphere.

"This discovery has made it possible for us to conduct a huge experiment on the entire world, doubling the amount of nitrogen that's available to living systems and really altering the entire biosphere," Hager said.

"[We are] doing this global experiment on a massive scale and nobody has really spent much time tracking the results. Very few scientists are following what they call the 'nitrogen cascade' through ecosystems, but they're appalled by what they find."

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Written by Express contributor Katherine Silkaitis
Photo by Eugene Register-Guard