Kind: captions
Language: en
the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry is
probably the most important Nobel Prize
ever awarded it was given to German
scientist Fritz hobber for solving one
of the biggest problems Humanity has
ever faced his invention is directly
responsible for the lives of 4 billion
people
today but when he received his prize
many of his peers refused to attend two
other Nobel Prize winners rejected their
Awards in protest and the New York Times
wrote a scathing article about him he is
simultaneously one of the most impactful
and tragic scientists of all
time perhaps more than any other single
person he has shaped the world we live
in
[Music]
today
if you are an American citizen and you
find an island with a lot of bird poop
on it well then you can claim that
Island for the United States and the us
will have your back the president is
authorized to send in the Navy and the
Army to defend your newly discovered
poop covered Island there are currently
10 American islands that were claimed in
this way and even though the law that
made this possible was passed in
1856 it is still in effect to this day
so why did people want poop covered
Islands so
[Music]
badly there are a few dozen islands off
the coast of Peru where millions of
seabirds gather to mate the waters near
the island are full of fish and these
millions of birds eat the fish and then
they poop
a
lot since the region is hot and dry this
poop solidifies and accumulates over
Millennia there are Cliffs of bird poop
30 m or 100 ft
[Music]
High technically bird poop is called
guano and by the mid 1800s buying and
selling bird Guana was Big Business the
price Rose as high as $76 per pound
meaning you could trade 4 lb of guano
for one lb of gold so why was there such
a big market for bird poop well to
answer that we have to look inside the
human
body by weight most of our bodies are
made up of oxygen carbon and hydrogen
but the fourth most common element is
nitrogen nitrogen is part of the amino
acids that form proteins it's part of
hemoglobin the compound that carries
oxygen and red blood cells and it's a
central component of DNA and RNA
nitrogen is essential for all life on
Earth we get our nitrogen by eating
plants or animals which have eaten
plants and plants get their nitrogen
from the
soil the problem is if you farm the same
soil year after year you harvest the
nitrogen out of it and eventually there
isn't enough nitrogen for healthy plants
to grow they can't produce enough
chlorophyll to photosynthesize which
stunts their growth their leaves turn
yellow and they are more susceptible to
pests and disease crucially for Farmers
nitrogen deficiency means smaller
yields the way to fix this is to add
nitrogen back into the soil which is
where bird guano comes in
guano is up to 20% nitrogen hundreds of
years ago Incan Farmers realized that
adding guano to their soil made crops
grow taller this is what allowed them to
grow food in places that were previously
unfarmable and expand their
empire South America's Rich deposits of
bird poop did not go unnoticed by the
rest of the world in 1865 Spain went to
war against its former colonies of Peru
Chile Ecuador and Bolivia for control of
their guano Laden Islands but such was
the world's appetite for nitrogen that
by
1872 guano was running out and Peru
banned further exports the world would
need another way to get its nitrogen
fix this was a crisis William krooks a
British chemist made a dire prophecy in
1898 with the world's growing population
and D windling supplies of nitrogen he
said we stand in deadly Peril of not
having enough to eat in less than 30
years time he argued people all over the
world will be dying of
starvation but he also proposed a
solution it is the chemist who must come
to the rescue it is through the
laboratory that starvation May
ultimately be turned into
plenty because here's the thing nitrogen
isn't rare it's common 78% of the air is
nitrogen but it's in a form that plants
and animals can't use two atoms of
nitrogen triple bonded together this
bond is one of the strongest in nature
the way to measure the strength of a
chemical bond is by the amount of energy
that's required to break it so to break
apart two chlorine atoms for example
would take 2 and A2 electron volts
to break apart two carbons requires 3.8
EV two oxygens 5.2 EV but to break apart
two atoms of nitrogen requires 9.8
electron volts a tremendous amount of
energy I just want to interject to say
that the molecular models in this video
were actually invented by me these are
snatoms a product I kickstarted about 8
years ago
where all the atoms snap together
magnetically so you can feel the
attraction between atoms and hear the
energy released when bonds form the
resulting molecules look and behave more
like real molecules and they are quicker
and easier to form and break apart
snatoms are for sale on Amazon and
snatoms dcom so I will put some links
down in the description now this video
is a repo post the original upload got
over 14 million views and then suddenly
it was age restricted and demonetized
but I think it's a really good video so
we're reposting it with the offending
section removed it's a reminder that you
can't always count on YouTube
monetization so if you want to support
these videos please consider purchasing
snatoms if you want some or supporting
us on patreon and now back to splitting
nitrogen
molecules
there are two processes that do this
naturally lightning releases so much
energy it breaks apart N2 into
individual nitrogen atoms they then
quickly react to form nitrogen oxides
and these molecules stay in the
atmosphere until they react with water
droplets in clouds and fall to the
ground in Rain there are also a few
types of back bacteria living in soil
that can break the N2 Bond using a
tremendous amount of energy to do so and
they make nitrogen available for plants
but bacteria only replenish the nitrogen
slowly and there's not enough lightning
to produce nitrogen compounds at scale
so chemists tried in 1811 gorg
hildbrandt mixed nitrogen and hydrogen
in a sealed flask trying to make ammonia
one of the nitrogen containing molecules
found in
guano when that didn't work he submerged
the flask 300 M underwater to increase
the pressure that didn't work either but
he was on the right track increasingly
sophisticated versions of these
experiments were carried out over the
following 100 years all of them
failed so when Fritz hobber became
interested in this problem in 1904 he
was joining a long line of failed
chemists
he was 36 years old working as a
low-level academic at the University of
Carl Ru he was also a new father with a
2-year-old boy named Herman and a wife
Clara who was one of the first women to
get a PhD in chemistry driven by pride
and competition with another scientist
hober spent 5 years on the problem his
idea was to combine nitrogen and
hydrogen not only at high pressure but
also at high temperature and in the
presence of a catalyst something that
lowers the amount of energy required to
split diatomic nitrogen to do this new
experimental apparatus had to be
invented hobber worked tirelessly on
this project building equipment that
could tolerate ever higher temperatures
and
pressures he also got lucky at the time
he was Moonlighting as a technical
consultant for a light bulb manufacturer
so there he had access to lots of really
hard to find materials like the element
osmium osmium is rare in his day there
was only about 100 kg of the refined
metal in existence but the company he
worked for was experimenting with using
it for filaments in their light bulbs so
they had most of the world's Supply
hober suspected it might make the
perfect catalyst so he brought a sample
back to his lab and there in the third
week of March 1909 hobber placed his
sheet of osmium in the pressure chamber
and then he pressurized and heated the
nitrogen and hydrogen to 200 atmospheres
and 500° C under these conditions the
triple bonds broke apart and nitrogen
reacted with hydrogen of the total gas
mixture 6% turned into ammonia when the
gas was cooled 1 ml of ammonia dripped
out the end of a narrow tube into into a
beaker an elated hobber rushed from one
lab to another yelling come on down
there's
ammonia Germany's biggest Chemical
Company BASF commercialized hobb's
process within 4 years they had opened a
factory in Opa producing 5 tons of
ammonia per
day people spoke of making bread from
the
[Music]
air with the fertilizer from this
industrial process on the same plot of
land farmers were able to grow four
times as much food and as a result the
population of the Earth
quadrupled there's a good chance you owe
your life to hobb's invention the Earth
supports 4 billion more people today
than it could without nitrogen
fertilizer in fact around 50% of the
nitrogen atoms in your body came from
the hobber
process the invention made Fritz hobber
a wealthy man he got a promotion
becoming the founding director of the
Kaiser wilham Institute for physical
chemistry in Berlin he also befriended
some of the best scientists of his day
including Max plank Max Bourne and
Albert Einstein after Einstein separated
from his first wife in 1914 he stayed
the night at hobb's house
but if habber was so well regarded why
was he shunned by colleagues when he won
the Nobel
prize Well it all comes down to what
happened in World War
I when the war broke out habber
volunteered for military duty unlike
pacifist Einstein who denounced the war
hobber was a patriot he wanted to use
his expertise to help his country only a
few months into the war the German Army
was already running out of gunpowder and
explosives ammonium nitrate besides
being an excellent fertilizer is also an
explosive just look at what happened in
Beirut in August of
2020 a warehouse containing almost 3,000
tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire and
in the extreme heat the fertilizer Det
ated the blast which could be heard
hundreds of kilometers away killed at
least 2117 people and injured thousands
more seismometers registered an
artificial earthquake measuring 3.3 on
the rter scale this is just one of many
fertilizer related explosions the opo
plant where hobb's process was first put
into practice would also explode in
1921 and the reason is is nitrogen we've
already seen that it takes a tremendous
amount of energy to break apart
nitrogen's triple bond but the flip side
of that coin is that when two nitrogen
atoms come together and form that Bond a
huge amount of energy is
released the explosions of gunpowder TNT
nitroglycerin and ammonium nitrate all
form datomic nitrogen gas as a product
and the formation of that triple bond is
where these chemicals derive much of
their explosive
energy hober lobbied to convert the
factories using his process to make
ammonia for fertilizer to create nitrate
for explosives
instead his superiors believed such a
conversion to be impossible but habber
persisted and soon his chemical process
was at the heart of the German war
machine from bread out of the air to
bombs out of the
air but hobber thought chemistry could
make an even bigger contribution to the
war in December 1914 he witnessed a
chemical weapons test he was unimpressed
hobber believed that he could do better
he set out to make a gas that was deadly
at low concentrations and heavier than
air so it would sink into enemy
trenches projectiles carrying chemical
weapons were banned at least in theory
by the hag Convention of
1899 but in practice after the start of
the war Germany France and Britain all
experimented with chemical weapons
hobber converted his wing of The
Institute into a chemical weapons
laboratory and after only a few months
of work he zeroed in on Chlor and gas an
employee otoh Han expressed his
discomfort about the new weapon hobber
told him innumerable a human lives would
be saved if the war could be ended more
quickly in this
way at 600 p.m. on the 22nd of April
with the wind blowing toward the Allied
trenches German troops released 168 tons
of chlorine from over 5,000 gas
cylinders the wall of gas Advanced
across the battlefield since chlorine
gas is 2 and a half times heavier than
air it sank into the trenches of the
Allied
soldiers any soldier that inhaled a
lungful of the gas suffered a terrible
death chlorine irritates the mucous
lining of the lungs so violently that
they fill with
liquid the soldiers effectively drowned
on dry
land more than 5,000 Allied soldiers
died this way in the first
attack
habber was promoted to the rank of
Captain habber spent the rest of the war
running his Institute researching
chemical weapons gas masks and
pesticides by 1917 The Institute
employed 1500 people including 150
scientists it was like a mini Manhattan
Project but for chemical
weapons in total 100,000 soldiers were
killed by chemical weapons in World War
I
when Germany surrendered habber was
crushed all the money he made from his
ammonia patent was lost to
hyperinflation in an attempt to pay off
Germany's crippling War debt he tried to
distill gold from seawater but the
project was
futile in 1933 the Nazis came to power
and passed a law that all Jewish civil
servants including scientists were to be
fired from their
jobs hobber was Jewish but he never
practiced the religion regardless his
military service Exempted him from the
law but he resigned from his role as
director in solidarity with all the
Jewish scientists who worked at The
Institute the next year in a hotel room
in bosel Switzerland he died of heart
failure
immediately after World War I hobbers
institute developed a cyanide-based
insecticide it had a barely detectable
odor so they mixed in a foul smelling
chemical to alert people to the danger
the resulting gas was called zycon b a
decade after hobb's death the Nazis
requested chemists remove the foul
smelling component and this form of
zycon B the chemical developed at hob
Institute was then used to perpetrate
the
Holocaust thinking about this story it
would be easy to paint hober as a
villain or as a hero for inventing the
process used to feed half the
world but another approach is to regard
him as irrelevant to the larger story
because someone else would have figured
out a way to process nitrogen out of the
air and other scientists were developing
chemical
weapons over the past few centuries
Science and Technology have improved Our
Lives
immeasurably but they have also given us
ever increasing ways to destroy
ourselves I think it'd be great to
believe that we could ask scientists to
only work on problems that are good for
Humanity but the reality it is that
every bit of information is a potential
double-edged sword you don't know the
outcome of your research or how it might
later be used ammonium nitrate is both a
fertilizer and an
explosive so the real question is how do
we keep increasing our knowledge and
control of the natural world without
destroying ourselves and everything else
on this planet in the process
that