Dominic Selwood
speaker
436 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Dominic Selwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Figures are difficult, but some say that in less than 10 minutes, on a Belgian spring day, a thousand French and Algerian soldiers were dead, and a further 4,000 were wounded.
What he had begun with chlorine gas, he then evolved also to study with phosgene and eventually mustard gas.
And together these three are the three ghastliest chemical weapons of the First World War.
His ammonia fertiliser process saved lives initially and his chemical weapons work took lives immediately.
Aside from notoriety, Haber's work also came at a great personal cost.
Appraisals of his work come down to patriotic duty and understanding at the time of total war on the one hand and the sheer horror of chemical warfare on the other.
Fritz Haber was born on December the 9th, 1868, in Breslau, which today is in Poland, but then was in the German kingdom of Prussia.
And he grew up, like many of his contemporaries, as a very strong German nationalist.
He was fascinated by science and he was clever.
He attended leading universities, including Heidelberg, where he studied under Bunsen, of Bunsen-Berner fame, then Berlin, and he specialized in physical chemistry and industrial chemistry.
At the age of 24, hoping to get on professionally, he converted from Judaism to Protestantism.
And he soon got prestigious jobs in Zurich, in Jena, and in Karlsruhe.
Harper was interested in solving actual problems that were around him.
And in the early 1900s, one of those was that Europe was running into serious difficulties in fertilizing its crops.
The vast shipments of bird droppings from South America that they had relied on were drying up and there was no obvious alternative.
So the innovation Haber is best remembered for is making ammonia in what became known as the Haber process.
And this involved combining nitrogen and hydrogen under high pressure and temperature to create ammonia.
The industrialist Carl Bosch became interested in Haber's work and together they perfected a process for creating ammonia on an industrial scale.
This was and still is known as the Haber-Bosch process and they rolled it out from their BASF plant in Ludwigshafen.
In 1900, the global population was 1.6 billion people.
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