The synthesis of ammonia from its elements - Resonance

The discovery of the process for economically viable manufacture of ammonia came at an almost providentially selected time in human civilization. The post industrial revolution period was witness to some drastic demographic changes, which lead to regions of dense human population that relied heavily for its food production on sparsely populated regions. This caused one of the earliest impacts of human civilization on the environment – nature’s ‘Nitrogen Cycle’ had been meddled with, and the soil needed to be artificially replenished of its rapidly depleting amounts fixed nitrogen for sustained agricultural utilization. Haber’s Nobel Lecture beautifully brings to fore the issues that concerned scientists at the turn of the last century and the importance of his discovery. In hindsight, one wonders how the human population would have made it this far had it not been for Haber’s discovery.

S Ramakrishnan
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

The synthesis of ammonia from its elements

Nobel Lecture, June 2, 1920

The Swedish Academy of Sciences has seen fit, by awarding the Nobel Prize, to honour the method of producing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. This outstanding distinction puts upon me the obligation of explaining the position occupied by this reaction within the subject of chemistry as a whole, and to outline the road which led to it.

We are concerned with a chemical phenomenon of the simplest possible kind. Gaseous nitrogen combines with gaseous hydrogen in simple quantitative proportions to produce gaseous ammonia. The three substances involved have been well known to the chemist for over a hundred years. During the second half of the last century each of them has been studied hundreds of times in its behaviour under various conditions during a period in which a flood of new chemical knowledge became available. If it has not been until the present century that the production of ammonia from the elements has been discovered, this is due to the fact that very special equipment must be used and strict conditions must be adhered to if one is to succeed in obtaining spontaneous combination of nitrogen and hydrogen on a substantial scale, and that a combination of experimental success with thermodynamic considerations was needed

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