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
There was also a terrifying psychological aspect, with fear of gas and gas attack, a constant presence in trench life.
By the end of World War I, after all sides had gone resolutely chemical, perhaps 190,000 tonnes of military gas had been produced, resulting in an estimated 90,000 deaths and 1.3 million casualties.
The war ended in 1918, and...
Astonishingly in 1919 the Nobel Committee awarded the prize in chemistry for 1918 to Haber but for his pre-war ammonia process.
Even at the time this was immensely controversial as Haber was by now widely viewed in very ambivalent ways.
Some valued him as a national asset but most viewed him as an infamous figure for his work with chemical weapons.
large numbers boycotted his Nobel ceremony.
But Haber continued after the war to work as a scientist, and he focused on trying to rehabilitate and reintegrate German science into the international scientific community.
One thing he worked on was, conscious of the crippling reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, he set about trying to extract gold from seawater to help Germany pay the impossibly unrealistic fines.
But his immense frustration failed in this task.
The next chapter of Haber's life starts when the Nazis came to power in 1933.
To his intense disappointment, it turned out that his service to the state and his seniority in the scientific community counted for nothing in a nation that had become fixated on racial purity.
The Nazis' racial laws required the dismissal of non-Aryan staff from research posts, and Haber had to oversee dismissing Jewish staff.
He tried to ignore the orders, delayed, and eventually resigned.
And despite his deep love for Germany, he left the country in protest at the racial ideology that was now being embedded in all sectors.
It's estimated that some 50% of the nitrogen atoms in the average human body, you and me, today derive from the Haber-Bosch process.
What is known as the harbour paradox is that his ammonia fertiliser process transformed agriculture globally and saved lives initially, and his chemical weapons work took lives immediately.
Appraisals of his work come down to patriotic duty and understanding at the time of total war on the one hand, and breaking international rules and the sheer horror of chemical warfare on the other.
The Mona Lisa is a small painting with a big story.
The real reason that it got absolute global fame was because of an incident that occurred in 1911 and the media exposure that followed.
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