HABER, FRITZ

HABER, FRITZ (1868–1934), German physical chemist and Nobel laureate. Haber was born in Breslau, the son of a prosperous chemical and dye merchant and an alderman of the city. After a period in industry and business, he went in 1893 to the Technische Hochschule at Karlsruhe, and in 1906 became professor of physical and electrochemistry. His work on carbon bonds led to a rule bearing his name. Turning to electrochemistry, he wrote Grundriss der technischen Electrochemie   auf theoretische Grundlage (1898) and was a co-developer of the glass electrode. In 1905 he wrote Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions. His most important work, started in 1904, was the synthesis of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen. His laboratory demonstration interested Bosch, Bergius, and the Badische Anilin-und Sodafabrik companies, and they eventually developed the process into a commercial operation. Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918 "for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements"; this work of Haber was to be invaluable to the German military effort in World War I. In 1911 he was made director of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Research Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, and in 1914 this was turned over to war work, particularly gas warfare, starting with chlorine and ending with mustard gas. After Germany's defeat, he reconstituted his Institute, and in the 1920s it became probably the leading center of physical chemistry in the world. Haber was president of the German Chemical Society, and of the Verband deutscher chemischer Vereine (which he created), and after some months spent in Japan he created the Japan Institute in Berlin and Tokyo. Haber left the Jewish faith, and with the Nazi accession to power in 1933 was not immediately threatened but he was ordered to dismiss all the Jews on the staff of his institute. He refused and resigned. His health, already poor, deteriorated. He went to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where he died. In 1952 a tablet was unveiled in Haber's memory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: M.H. Goran, The Story of Fritz Haber (1967), incl. bibl.; R. Stern, in: YLBI, 8 (1963), 70–102. (Samuel Aaron Miller)