Fritz Haber

Fritz Haber was a German chemist who invented the process, later industrialized as the Haber-Bosch process, for synthesizing ammonia directly from nitrogen and hydrogen gas under high temperature and pressure, developed in 1909 and scaled to industrial production by chemist and engineer Carl Bosch. The process made possible the mass production of nitrogen-based fertilizers, and roughly a third of annual global food production still depends on ammonia made this way, supporting nearly half the world's population; Haber received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. During the First World War he also directed Germany's chemical weapons program and personally oversaw the first large-scale use of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, earning him the description father of chemical warfare, a legacy in stark contrast to his agricultural breakthrough. Despite his wartime service and earlier conversion to Christianity, he was forced to resign his position after the Nazi rise to power in 1933 because of his Jewish heritage, and he died in Basel, Switzerland, in January 1934 while traveling toward a new research post.