6 ms·

"Billions of people would not exist without him. And yet without him, World War I would have ended years earlier" The article is very interesting, but there is

by soneca 9y ago

"Billions of people would not exist without him. And yet without him, World War I would have ended years earlier" The article is very interesting, but there is this Hollywood simplistic approach where one man is responsible for all things. The text even mention the Allies developing a poison gas, why not other German chemic? No one other person would be able to discover how to produce amonia? I don't subscribe to this way of looking into historical figures. Nevertheless, a great text.

nabla9 9y ago
It seems that he was lobbying hard for the use of the gas.
- notahacker 9y ago
  Yep. Prevailing military opinion against using poison gases could have changed over the course of the war, of course, but he brought both the technical knowhow and the outspoken advocacy. The Allies' first alleged use of poison gas turned out to be an unfounded rumour which Haber himself was responsible for disproving. Didn't take the Allies long to muster a response though, and they had their own Nobel Laureate Victor Grignard to build chemical weapons for them.
nscalf 9y ago
To put some of this into context, there were a lot of people saying that the world was going to run out of food soon and we couldn't sustain our growing population. It'd be as if someone today invented a solution to global warming, it was a problem everyone knew about and worried about to some extend.
mannykannot 9y ago
There is no doubt that if he had not solved the nitrogen-fixing problem, someone else would have, and it is certainly possible that someone else would have pushed the use of poison gas into practice. It is also generally simplistic to claim that any one thing greatly prolonged the war. 'Great men' and 'pivotal event' historiography is a simplistic way of looking at the past, but nevertheless, it is a simple historical fact that he was the person who did these two things, and the case for nitrogen-fixing extending the war is better than most other 'but for...' stories.
- dclowd9901 9y ago
  I think people take special people for granted. You can't say, for certain, that anyone would have figured out the nitrogen fixing problem _in a period of time when it would have been effective to have done so_. The entire world could have been blown up before someone came along to figure it out. The world has yet to churn out another mind quite like Einstein's, that flips convention on its head, or opens up humankind's collective knowledge by an order of magnitude. Special people, like Einstein, this man, Norman Borlaug or Ada Lovelace, I think, may have just been the right people at the right moment.
  - Balero 9y ago
    I disagree. I think there are many minds that would be capable of what these people did (not everyone, certainly not myself, but thousands of people alive today). It is a case of having the right person in the right place at the right time, Einstein would have not had his theories had he been around 20 years earlier, or if he had not had the opportunities that he did. And if he had not been around then I think it would have been others. It is about the environment, Calculus was developed by two people simultaneously. As to why we haven't had someone who has done this, well who's to say that we haven't and they are just overlooked? Or that greater capital expenditure it has to be groups of people (finding DNA, cloning, Graphene, etc). Or that there has simply not been the right environment.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    You are right; I cannot say for certain that someone else would have solved the nitrogen fixing problem in time to save humanity from global starvation, but for it not to happen, it would have required a lot of chemists to all not perform the sort of experiments that chemists are trained, employed and choose to do. Having read somewhat widely, as a kid, about the history of technology, I was struck by how often several people were working independently on the same ideas at the same time, but that is not so surprising once you realize that the timing is often determined by when some prerequisite knowledge became available, or some prerequisite capability was mastered. Einstein stands among the most original thinkers of all time, but even he was standing on the shoulders of people like Heaviside, Fitzgerald and Lorentz (and Maxwell, of course) - yet the first three, at least, are invisible in popular historiography.
23443463455 9y ago
You also highlight, maybe without realizing it, an inherent blind assumption that somehow more humans on the planet is better than less humans, when in every regard and all measures would indicate the clear opposite being true. It almost feels like an addiction, a compulsory habit or even a physiological dependency on the notion that more people is a good thing. The sustainably and ecologically balanced and qualitatively positive carrying capacity of the planet is far lower than even today's population, but for some reason even just bringing that notion up is not only ignored, but even countered not with rational argument, but violently aggressive hostility ... just like one would expect someone addicted to react to the confrontation about their addiction.
blablablaber 9y ago
"@but there is this Hollywood simplistic approach where one man is responsible for all things [..] I don't subscribe to this way of looking into historical figures" I applaud you for that, this gives some hope that not all is lost. A real historian can only be someone who loves the truth ( .. more than his personal well-beign)
aje403 9y ago
This has nothing to do with Hollywood. Looking at it from that perspective is blind to history and human accomplishment. That's (part of) what our species... does. Is it a good or a bad thing? This would be a very different planet - perhaps without computers or centralized governments or much else, if societies did not place considerable blame or praise on individuals or small groups for large events or discoveries.
- icebraining 9y ago
  That's another simplistic approach. You can place praise or blame without saying that they were literally indispensable for its existence. Making it happen a few months or years sooner is praiseworthy in itself.
  - aje403 9y ago
    I don't think you're following what I'm arguing from your response - let me re-state - I'm not saying that the "truth" is that Fritz Haber is the only one who could've "discovered" his procedure for ammonia, at any point, or even at any point in the 1910's; that is likely not the case in reality. I am making a separate argument - this would not have been invented at all, yet, if humans, throughout history, did not celebrate or recognize specific individuals as being responsible for these monumental discoveries or events.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      I understood what you wrote initially.
      - aje403 9y ago
        Then I will argue your initial response is a non-sequitur to my initial comment - it's not a question of whether of whether or not we "can" or "cannot" diminish one's role in something - we certainly can. But, we're a competitive species. I think it has been an important characteristic in our evolution. In the alternate reality where people don't take overstated credit for success, in whatever form, Haber and all the other scientists who probably grew up reading of the great scientists who came before them that they wanted to emulate may have been tribal village raiders (I'm exaggerating, very slightly). Frankly, any form of desire to see somebody else's limelight revoked likely stems from their own competitivity and insecurity.
ribs 9y ago
The story isn’t about ammonia; it’s about Haber.
zouhair 9y ago
He did it though. Assuming that anyone else could have done it or would have done is a bit presumptuous. Look at the history of sound recording[0] for example. You can see that the technology that made it possible existed for years and years before anyone attempted such a feat. Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that. What bugs me though is what are the things that could exist right now but are not because someone still didn't think about them.
- felipemnoa 9y ago
  >>Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that. Reminds me of Hero's engine [1]. Had a single person decided to build a working industrial steam engine back then, then it is possible that the industrial revolution could've happened two thousand years ago. I believe the technology to build it was there, nobody had the imagination to see the potential for this though. Humanity missed its opportunity back then, thankfully we had another chance almost 1800 hundred years latter and this time there were people that seized the opportunity [2],[3] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine
  - cfmcdonald 9y ago
    Considering how fragmented the pre-modern historical record is and how little attention is paid to technology in most of the sources we do have, it's quite possible that someone did build a Newcomen style engine 2000 years ago, it could even have happened many times. However, it was probably only worth using one once labor costs reached a certain threshold. e.g. if you were an ancient roman landlord with abundant slave labor, why would you go to the trouble and expense of building steam engines to remove water from your mines rather than just having some workers work the pumps? Moreover a Newcomen engine was so inefficient that it was really only usable when sited right at a coal mine, and in ancient times there were plenty of surface coal sites that didn't require deep mines (and thus pumps). It's hard to imagine someone leaping straight to a Watt engine, especially given the metallurgy required.
lr4444lr 9y ago
What the article takes pains to point out though was that despite competing gas technology, Haber not only invented but actively persuaded the German army to use it as an instrument of war. He did so in direct contravention not only to the rules of engagement at the time, but even the moral objections of his wife. This laid the groundwork for scientists in Nazi Germany to not only contribute their knowledge to war's death machine without remorse, but to feel compelled to do so as a moral good.

by soneca 9y ago

nabla9 9y ago

It seems that he was lobbying hard for the use of the gas.

notahacker 9y ago
Yep. Prevailing military opinion against using poison gases could have changed over the course of the war, of course, but he brought both the technical knowhow and the outspoken advocacy. The Allies' first alleged use of poison gas turned out to be an unfounded rumour which Haber himself was responsible for disproving. Didn't take the Allies long to muster a response though, and they had their own Nobel Laureate Victor Grignard to build chemical weapons for them.

nscalf 9y ago

To put some of this into context, there were a lot of people saying that the world was going to run out of food soon and we couldn't sustain our growing population. It'd be as if someone today invented a solution to global warming, it was a problem everyone knew about and worried about to some extend.

mannykannot 9y ago

There is no doubt that if he had not solved the nitrogen-fixing problem, someone else would have, and it is certainly possible that someone else would have pushed the use of poison gas into practice. It is also generally simplistic to claim that any one thing greatly prolonged the war. 'Great men' and 'pivotal event' historiography is a simplistic way of looking at the past, but nevertheless, it is a simple historical fact that he was the person who did these two things, and the case for nitrogen-fixing extending the war is better than most other 'but for...' stories.

dclowd9901 9y ago
I think people take special people for granted. You can't say, for certain, that anyone would have figured out the nitrogen fixing problem _in a period of time when it would have been effective to have done so_. The entire world could have been blown up before someone came along to figure it out. The world has yet to churn out another mind quite like Einstein's, that flips convention on its head, or opens up humankind's collective knowledge by an order of magnitude. Special people, like Einstein, this man, Norman Borlaug or Ada Lovelace, I think, may have just been the right people at the right moment.
- Balero 9y ago
  I disagree. I think there are many minds that would be capable of what these people did (not everyone, certainly not myself, but thousands of people alive today). It is a case of having the right person in the right place at the right time, Einstein would have not had his theories had he been around 20 years earlier, or if he had not had the opportunities that he did. And if he had not been around then I think it would have been others. It is about the environment, Calculus was developed by two people simultaneously. As to why we haven't had someone who has done this, well who's to say that we haven't and they are just overlooked? Or that greater capital expenditure it has to be groups of people (finding DNA, cloning, Graphene, etc). Or that there has simply not been the right environment.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  You are right; I cannot say for certain that someone else would have solved the nitrogen fixing problem in time to save humanity from global starvation, but for it not to happen, it would have required a lot of chemists to all not perform the sort of experiments that chemists are trained, employed and choose to do. Having read somewhat widely, as a kid, about the history of technology, I was struck by how often several people were working independently on the same ideas at the same time, but that is not so surprising once you realize that the timing is often determined by when some prerequisite knowledge became available, or some prerequisite capability was mastered. Einstein stands among the most original thinkers of all time, but even he was standing on the shoulders of people like Heaviside, Fitzgerald and Lorentz (and Maxwell, of course) - yet the first three, at least, are invisible in popular historiography.

23443463455 9y ago

You also highlight, maybe without realizing it, an inherent blind assumption that somehow more humans on the planet is better than less humans, when in every regard and all measures would indicate the clear opposite being true. It almost feels like an addiction, a compulsory habit or even a physiological dependency on the notion that more people is a good thing. The sustainably and ecologically balanced and qualitatively positive carrying capacity of the planet is far lower than even today's population, but for some reason even just bringing that notion up is not only ignored, but even countered not with rational argument, but violently aggressive hostility ... just like one would expect someone addicted to react to the confrontation about their addiction.

blablablaber 9y ago

"@but there is this Hollywood simplistic approach where one man is responsible for all things [..] I don't subscribe to this way of looking into historical figures" I applaud you for that, this gives some hope that not all is lost. A real historian can only be someone who loves the truth ( .. more than his personal well-beign)

aje403 9y ago

This has nothing to do with Hollywood. Looking at it from that perspective is blind to history and human accomplishment. That's (part of) what our species... does. Is it a good or a bad thing? This would be a very different planet - perhaps without computers or centralized governments or much else, if societies did not place considerable blame or praise on individuals or small groups for large events or discoveries.

icebraining 9y ago
That's another simplistic approach. You can place praise or blame without saying that they were literally indispensable for its existence. Making it happen a few months or years sooner is praiseworthy in itself.
- aje403 9y ago
  I don't think you're following what I'm arguing from your response - let me re-state - I'm not saying that the "truth" is that Fritz Haber is the only one who could've "discovered" his procedure for ammonia, at any point, or even at any point in the 1910's; that is likely not the case in reality. I am making a separate argument - this would not have been invented at all, yet, if humans, throughout history, did not celebrate or recognize specific individuals as being responsible for these monumental discoveries or events.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I understood what you wrote initially.
    - aje403 9y ago
      Then I will argue your initial response is a non-sequitur to my initial comment - it's not a question of whether of whether or not we "can" or "cannot" diminish one's role in something - we certainly can. But, we're a competitive species. I think it has been an important characteristic in our evolution. In the alternate reality where people don't take overstated credit for success, in whatever form, Haber and all the other scientists who probably grew up reading of the great scientists who came before them that they wanted to emulate may have been tribal village raiders (I'm exaggerating, very slightly). Frankly, any form of desire to see somebody else's limelight revoked likely stems from their own competitivity and insecurity.

ribs 9y ago

The story isn’t about ammonia; it’s about Haber.

zouhair 9y ago

He did it though. Assuming that anyone else could have done it or would have done is a bit presumptuous. Look at the history of sound recording[0] for example. You can see that the technology that made it possible existed for years and years before anyone attempted such a feat. Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that. What bugs me though is what are the things that could exist right now but are not because someone still didn't think about them.

felipemnoa 9y ago
>>Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that. Reminds me of Hero's engine [1]. Had a single person decided to build a working industrial steam engine back then, then it is possible that the industrial revolution could've happened two thousand years ago. I believe the technology to build it was there, nobody had the imagination to see the potential for this though. Humanity missed its opportunity back then, thankfully we had another chance almost 1800 hundred years latter and this time there were people that seized the opportunity [2],[3] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine
- cfmcdonald 9y ago
  Considering how fragmented the pre-modern historical record is and how little attention is paid to technology in most of the sources we do have, it's quite possible that someone did build a Newcomen style engine 2000 years ago, it could even have happened many times. However, it was probably only worth using one once labor costs reached a certain threshold. e.g. if you were an ancient roman landlord with abundant slave labor, why would you go to the trouble and expense of building steam engines to remove water from your mines rather than just having some workers work the pumps? Moreover a Newcomen engine was so inefficient that it was really only usable when sited right at a coal mine, and in ancient times there were plenty of surface coal sites that didn't require deep mines (and thus pumps). It's hard to imagine someone leaping straight to a Watt engine, especially given the metallurgy required.

lr4444lr 9y ago

What the article takes pains to point out though was that despite competing gas technology, Haber not only invented but actively persuaded the German army to use it as an instrument of war. He did so in direct contravention not only to the rules of engagement at the time, but even the moral objections of his wife. This laid the groundwork for scientists in Nazi Germany to not only contribute their knowledge to war's death machine without remorse, but to feel compelled to do so as a moral good.