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
It is now 8.3 billion, thanks in large part to the Haber-Bosch process, which, quote-unquote, made bread out of air.
When World War One broke out, science was immediately mobilised by all countries and Haber placed his institute at the service of the state.
Like many academics, he was happy to help, as this war was seen for the first time in history really as a total war, in which every skill and sector of the economy had to be deployed in the war effort.
So he allowed his ammonia process to be used for explosives and munitions, which was a vast boost to the German war effort.
At the time, chemical warfare was illegal.
Others were doing it.
The French had been first, deploying tear gas, leading to an escalation.
But there is a big difference between tear gas and chlorine gas.
Technically, all of it was against the various conventions, including the Hague Conventions, but all sides argued that this was necessity.
Largely under his direction, German chemists developed cylinder-released chlorine gas to use on the battlefields.
At the Second Battle of Ypres, which was on April 22nd, 1915, he released approximately 6,000 cylinders of chlorine gas, awakening the world to a brand new terror.
He had married Clara Immenwar before the war.
She was a brilliant chemist, one of the first women in Germany to be awarded a PhD and the first woman PhD from Breslau University.
When he returned home from Ypres after that initial deployment, she challenged him.
And despite Fritz's belief that death by gas was no worse than any other form of wartime killing…
His work and her opinions utterly devastated her.
She went upstairs, took his service revolver, and shot herself.
Chlorine and phosgene gases caused agonizing and permanent respiratory damage.
Mustard gas caused blistering and severe eye injuries.
Many people were killed by these gases, but the real horror lay in the vast numbers who were permanently wounded or crippled from it.
Showing 121–140 of 436 · page 7 of 22
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