FEATURE

636 nature geoscience | VOL 1 | OCTOBER 2008 | www.nature. com/naturegeoscience

On 13 October 1908, Fritz Haber fi led his patent on the " synthesis of ammonia from its elements"
for which he was later awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry .
A hundred years on we live in a world transformed by and highly dependent upon Haber–Bosch nitrogen.

(...) In his Nobel lecture, Haber explained that his main motiv ation for synthesizing ammonia from its elements was the growing demand for food.

(...) Haber's other motivation, not mentioned in his lecture, was to provide the raw material for explosives to be used in weapons,
which requires large amounts of reactive nitrogen.