The Alchemy of Air (Book)

On gunpowder

• Because every barrel of gunpowder required three-quarters of a barrel of saltpeter, access to saltpeter became a matter of national survival.
• In 1626 England’s King Charles I commanded his subjects to “carefully and constantly keep and preserve in some convenient vessels or receptacles fit for the purpose, all the urine of man during the whole year, and all the stale of beasts which they can save” to be donated to the saltpeter plantations
• The mother lode of saltpeter, however, the only natural deposits in the world large enough to feed the gunpowder needs of an entire nation, was discovered in the mud flats of the Ganges in India (where it was believed that a combination of the river water, the hot climate, and the dung of holy cows combined to create a sort of huge natural saltpeter plantation). The British East India Company started shipping it to England by the ton in the mid-seventeenth century—it was one of the company’s most important cargoes—and this vital natural resource made India an especially important target for European colonial expansion. Saltpeter was a significant factor in favor of the British takeover of India.

On Guano and Peru's Economy

• They survived only because their village perched on the edge of one of the world’s richest fishing grounds. The great Humboldt Current, a giant river in the sea, rolled from Antarctica up along the west coast of South America, bringing with it a wealth of plankton, shrimp, and fish that fed local seals, natives, and millions of sea birds. The land here was dead. But the sea was teeming.

• These were the Chinchas Islands, a sprinkling of rocks six miles off the coast of Pisco, Peru, which constituted, in 1850, acre for acre, the most valuable real estate on earth. The value came from the ground the workers and the birds walked on: ten stories of guano, the world’s best fertilizer.

• Annual shipments grew to hundreds of thousands of tons per year in the United States and as much in Great Britain. Its availability became a matter of national policy. In 1850 President Millard Fillmore, in his first State of the Union address, noted that “Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article to the agricultural interests in the United States that it is the duty of Government to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price.”
• About a third of the sale price of every ton of guano went into the treasury of Peru, a flow of income that by 1859 accounted for three-quarters of the nation’s national budget.
• As long as the money lasted it looked as if Peru, as one enthusiastic observer wrote in 1857, was destined to become “at once the richest and happiest nation on earth.”
• The need was so great that in 1856 the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed any U.S. citizen to lay claim to any deserted guano island anywhere in the world and make it U.S. territory.
• The Guano Islands Act is still in effect.
• In most places around the world, too much rain washed out the nitrogen content and lowered quality. Chinchas-level guano was found on only a very few rocks with the right mix of abundant seabirds and an arid climate. Nothing else came close.
• The end of guano also meant an end to Peru’s easy income. By the 1870s the nation was for all practical purposes bankrupt.

On nitrates and Chile's Economy

• By 1900, Chile was producing two-thirds of all the fertilizer used on earth.
• Nitrates were Germany’s life blood, and their distance from Germany—halfway around the world—became a matter of strategic importance. German entrepreneurs created fleets of majestic windjammers for the nitrate trade, the biggest sailing ships ever built, with clouds of sail that drove them so fast that they were preferred even in the age of steam.
• Soon nitrates were bringing in more than half of Chile’s total income (nitrates would remain the single most important factor in the national economy until the 1930s).
• His investors began making 10, 15, 20 percent dividends in a single year. "The company promoter has only to whisper the magic word nitrates and the market rises at him," marveled London’s Financial News. Speculators started calling Chilean nitrate white gold. (Again and again this happens. Across the decades and centuries. When something is in demand, crooks set up new companies and rename old ones, and the market drives up their prices)
• Then the bubble burst. Rampant nitrate speculation led by North pushed share prices well beyond the value of the land and mills. To keep returning high profits the refineries overproduced, flooded the market with nitrates, and held down prices. By the end of 1890 shares in nitrate companies were being sold for a quarter the price they had commanded a year or two earlier.
• Chile, like Peru, depended on foreign capital and foreign expertise (mostly European) to power those improvements. Unlike Peru, however, it kept its own people employed in the industry and offered a stable atmosphere for development.

The birth of Haber-Bosch

• What ended Chile’s nitrate age was not shortage but plenty. Just as the workers were marching into Iquique, half a world away a German chemist was channeling his anger into perfecting a machine that would within thirty years bring down the entire Chilean industry. The man was Fritz Haber. The machine he was working on, it was said, could turn air into bread.
• The only thing in nature hot enough to break apart N2 is a bolt of lightning.
• Brunck’s first great gamble had involved the prized dye indigo. The German dye industry had become rich by making synthetic colors from coal to replace rare and expensive natural fabric dyes made from plants and animals. Germany had an abundance of coal, and German dye chemists were expert at transforming cheap coal—by heating it, distilling it, breaking it into its many component compounds, then refashioning these compounds—into expensive products. That was the beauty of the chemical industry. It could turn common ingredients into big money. This was how BASF had started.
• It was the holy grail of dyes. Lightly dyed with indigo, fabrics turned the azure of the sky. Deeply dyed, they approached a royal purple. Now we know it mostly as the blue of blue jeans, but its origins were much loftier.
• He failed. After years of rising costs, synthetic indigo still eluded BASF and the board began to grumble. But as the 1880s turned into the 1890s Brunck saw something bigger emerging from the effort, something potentially more important than indigo. The infrastructure he had built for a specific dye was turning into something more: It was a way to transform a dye company into a modern chemical company. Large amounts of certain acids were needed for the indigo project, for example, so to save money his growing cadre of BASF chemists figured out better ways to make acids in bulk. They soon had excess acids to sell. Chlorine was another important raw material for dye processing; a BASF chemist found a better way to purify it and the company began selling it. All these processes took place in machines, and Brunck paid attention to the required engineering as well as chemistry, seeing the two as inextricable, pioneering the field of chemical engineering before people ever used the term. He saw BASF not as a miscellany of separate parts but as a single integrated machine, with each research team, each improved process, each new product feeding into others, making complex processes cheaper and more efficient.
• Brunck, however, was already looking ahead. Synthetic indigo was the last great hurrah of a dying (pun intended) industry. The secrets of the German dye industry were being copied around the world, competition was heating up, and the market was being saturated with a rainbow of competing colors. If nothing was found to replace dyes, German firms would start tearing each other apart for smaller pieces of a shrinking market.
• The research had been expensive, but as problem after problem was solved, the final system was highly efficient. Bosch’s solutions were not high cost, idealized, or theoretically impeccable; his machine was not a perfect machine. It was a series of practical fixes, cleverly and solidly stitched together. And it worked.
• Still, the demand for their products is so great that Haber-Bosch plants today consume 1 percent of all the energy on earth

The War

• Until the new conversion plants were up and running, however, Germany still had to rely on shipments of nitrate from South America. This led to one of the stranger moments of World War I when, on November 1, 1914, the first major sea battle of the war began—halfway around the world from Germany and France, off the coast of Chile. It was brief and brutal. In heavy seas, with darkness falling, a squadron of Germany’s most modern warships led by Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee engaged and sank several older, badly outgunned British warships. The battle continued by moonlight, with the Germans aiming at the fires that were burning on the British ships. The British lost two cruisers and sixteen hundred sailors and officers. The Germans did not lose a ship; their casualties totaled two wounded. It was the Royal Navy’s first significant defeat since the days of Napoléon.
• No one at Oppau was expecting an attack from the air. The whole idea of airplane warfare was too new, the techniques too primitive, to imagine that the enemy would try to fly into Germany to attack a factory. But on the sunny morning of May 27, 1915, that is exactly what happened. A squadron of French planes, small, flimsy machines made of canvas and wood, buzzed over Oppau and began to drop small bombs on the buildings, the trains that carried workers to the plant, and the workers themselves. Oppau had no air defenses, but damage was slight (mostly because bombing technology was so rudimentary). The event did, however, mark the beginning of a new kind of war, an air war directed not at combatants but at the factories that supplied them.
• They would merge a number of administrative functions. They would present a united front to the world—while still marketing and selling products under their old individual names. It became official in the fall of 1925 under the name of the Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (literally, the Interest Community of the Dye Industry, Inc.), an unwieldy name that the public quickly shortened to IG Farben, or, simply, Farben.
• The company had plowed nitrogen income into high-power research laboratories, in-house development centers that were starting to work on synthetic gasoline. When investors complained that their dividends were disappearing into the labs, Bosch responded, “I consider it a far higher moral obligation to provide a secure livelihood to the . . . men and women currently employed by our firms rather than respond to a fluctuating economy or fluctuating revenue and simply pay out a dividend when possible.” The payoff was going to come from Leuna’s successful creation of synthetic gasoline.
• Before it was over, the Allies launched twenty-two massive air raids on Leuna, in which more than six thousand bombers dropped more than eighteen thousand tons of explosives—an amount equivalent to the Hiroshima atomic bomb. They never succeeded in shutting Leuna down entirely—when the war ended, the plant was producing synthetic gasoline at about 15 percent of its former level—but they did cut off enough of Hitler’s fuel supplies to hasten the end of the war. Bosch’s dream machine was finally smashed and with it the hopes of the Third Reich.