Jad Abumrad

He figures out a way to take a lot of air that's filled with these little nitrogen bonds clinging to each other and pump it to a big iron tank under extreme, extreme pressure at high temperature.

And then he forces hydrogen into the tank.

And you have a number of chemical reactions.

And what happens is that you're elbowing the nitrogen apart from itself and then forcing it to bond with the hydrogen in a new way.

And when hydrogen and nitrogen bond together, the thing you get... Is ammonia.

A liquid...

that has captured the nitrogen right out of the air.

You literally get a drip, drip, drip of ammonia.

It is arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all.

Bread from the air was the phrase.

Because Hopper had figured out a way to take nitrogen from the air, put it into the barren ground, and grow wheat.

This has allowed the world to have 7 billion people.

This is what's driving the world towards 10, 12 by 2050.

Now we're seeing about 100 million tons of synthetic fertilizer produced industrially each year, and that tonnages then moves into our food source.

Our food source then moves into our bodies, and the rough statistics are that half of each of our bodies contains nitrogen from the Haber process.

No, she really...

And so in 1918, Fritz Hopper gets a Nobel Prize.

But, and this is why this is such an interesting guy, around this same time, officials in the US government are calling him a war criminal.

All right, just to back up for one second.

After Haber's nitrogen discovery... He was promoted.