Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/347/en

At the beginning of the twentieth century, atmospheric nitrogen was oxidized in electric furnaces in Norway by the Birkeland-Eyde process. It proved too costly. The chemist Fritz Haber (1868–1934) worked from 1905 to 1910 at BASF in Ludwigshafen am Rhein to establish the scientific foundations of ammonia synthesis from atmospheric nitrogen; his partner, the engineer Carl Bosch, created the large-scale industrial plant for this synthesis by 1913. In the Haber-Bosch process named after them, atmospheric nitrogen is reacted with hydrogen gas in contact furnaces at a pressure of 200 bar and temperatures of 500 to 600°C in the presence of catalysts. One can see how the extraordinarily inert nitrogen of the air — which the legumes, in a quiet, gentle way, activate within the cosmic-terrestrial rhythms of the solar year as a life process of protein formation — is here, on the inorganic-technical level, forced with great expenditure of energy and independently of place and time, by sheer violence, into a highly reactive compound. This invention, like the later one of the unleashing of nuclear energy, opens forces of sub-nature to human arbitrariness — forces whose handling henceforth leaves traces of destruction in the work of creation that is nature.