Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/235/en

At the beginning of the twentieth century, atmospheric nitrogen was oxidised in Norway in the electric furnace by the Birkeland-Eyde process. It proved too costly. The chemist Fritz Haber (1868–1934) worked out, from 1905 to 1910 at BASF in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, the scientific foundations of the ammonia synthesis from atmospheric nitrogen; his partner, the engineer Carl Bosch, created the large-scale industrial plant for this synthesis by 1913. In this Haber-Bosch process named after them, atmospheric nitrogen is brought to react 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 activate for the life process of protein formation in the quiet, gentle way, within the cosmic-earthly rhythms of the solar year — is here, on the level of inorganic technology, with enormous expenditure of energy and independently of place and time, forced with violence into a highly reactive compound. This invention — like, later, that of the unleashing of nuclear energy — unlocks forces of sub-nature to human arbitrariness, whose handling leaves from then on traces of destruction in the work of creation of nature.