Six months later, these musings came together in a fifty-eight-page memorandum he sent to Gustav von Bruning, the head of Hoechst; Heinrich Brunck at BASF; and Franz Oppenheim, the leading director at Agfa, the Berlin-based photochemicals business. His great vision, he explained, was an immediate American-style amalgamation of the sales, purchasing, and research departments of their companies, with the possibility that other, smaller firms might later be invited to join them in an industrywide coalition. He made it clear that the proposal was on a scale far beyond any of the ad hoc, project-specific partnerships the firms had occasionally entered into in the past. Each would retain its corporate autonomy, but by working in harness they would be able to limit the competition that was always threatening to undermine their profitability.
Duisberg was convinced his fellow moguls would find his scheme irresistible. Several of their more successful patents were getting close to expiration and the wellspring of technological innovation in their core dye businesses—still a major source of income for each firm—seemed to be running a little dry. By pooling their research resources they would be able to put more effort into finding new product lines, while a joint sales operation could control supplies to the marketplace and fix prices to the companies’ mutual benefit.
He was delighted when von Bruning, Brunck, and Oppenheim agreed to discuss his proposals at a private meeting in Berlin’s Kaiserhof Hotel in February 1904, and he briefly allowed himself to hope that his grand plan might be bearing fruit. But while Brunck and Oppenheim greeted his ideas with cautious interest, it became apparent during the session that von Bruning was implacably opposed. Duisberg was deeply puzzled. He couldn’t understand the Hoechst director’s refusal to consider something so clearly advantageous to all.
In September of that year, he opened his morning newspaper and the mystery was solved. Hoechst had been in secret negotiations with Leopold Cassella and Company, the Frankfurt-based dye business. The outcome of their talks was nowhere near a full merger, but the two companies had agreed to swap stock and consult each other at all levels of business. The arrangement was called an Interessen Gemeinschaft, or community of interests, with the directors of both firms sitting on each other’s boards and making decisions for their joint advantage. Two other smaller firms, Kalle and Company and Griesheim Elektron (a dyestuffs business with important interests outside organic chemistry), were scheduled to join them later.
Fearful of being on the receiving end of this new combine’s strength in the marketplace and infuriated by the way he had been outsmarted, Duisberg immediately reopened negotiations with BASF and Agfa. The result was the Dreibund, or Triple Association, established in late November 1904. Similar in composition to its rivals’ confederation, the association was a relatively loose arrangement that left its constituent companies independent while they cooperated on many aspects of their business.* As such it was still a considerable way from Duisberg’s grander vision of an industrywide amalgamation, but at least it ironed out some of the problems of competition that had bedeviled the industry for so long. A more substantial merger would have to wait for more propitious times.
In May of the following year, as though to underline Duisberg’s point about the merits of German chemical businesses working in harmony rather than against one another, Bayer came up against exactly the kind of problem that a full industry coalition might have avoided. Its lawyers discovered that another German company, Chemische Fabrik von Heyden, had been selling its own version of acetylsalicylic acid in England. When Bayer went to court in London to assert its intellectual property rights and sue for damages, the judge, a Justice Joyce, affirmed what European authorities had claimed earlier—that Bayer’s 1898 application for a UK aspirin patent had been written in such vague terms that it was impossible to determine whether the drug was really a new invention or merely an enhancement of work done by Charles Gerhardt and others. Clearly irritated by this document, which he found “erroneous and misleading,… by accident, error or design so framed as to obscure the subject as much as possible,” Joyce concluded that
it would be a strange and marvellous thing, and to my mind much to be regretted, if after all that had been done and published with regard to acetylsalicylic acid before the date of this patent, an ingenious person, by merely putting forward a different, if you like a better mode of purification … could successfully claim as his invention and obtain a valid patent for the production of acetylsalicylic acid as a new body or compound. In my opinion, it was not a new body or compound and I hold the patent in question in this case to be invalid.
The ruling meant that anyone, in theory, could now make and sell acetylsalicylic acid in the British Empire—a nightmare for Carl Duisberg since aspirin was his company’s most successful export product.* Judge Joyce’s words were also symptomatic of a growing international unease at the hold that the German chemical companies had on the secrets of their trade. Used to denying their domestic competitors the slightest advantage, German businesses had gotten into the habit of writing their patents in an obscure way in order to make it as hard as possible for rivals to copy their products. They were comfortable enough with this custom themselves and had become well versed in finding ways around it when necessary, but their foreign competitors took great exception to the practice. Whether he had intended it as such or not, Joyce’s decision was therefore hailed as the start of a fight back, the first round in a David and Goliath battle.
In 1907 British industrialists’ frustration with German patent habits became coterminous with official government policy. After much lobbying and pressure in Parliament, the minister of trade, David Lloyd George, announced that the patent laws were to be changed. Henceforth, goods that were granted a patent in the UK had to be made in the UK, allowing British manufacturers the opportunity to gain an insight into how they were made and thereby to develop new skills and technologies. If the patent was not worked in Britain, the license could be withdrawn. Lloyd George’s justification for this decision was clearly influenced by Joyce’s ruling.
Big foreign syndicates have one very effective way of destroying British industry. They first of all apply for patents on a very considerable scale. They suggest every possible combination, for instance, in chemicals, which human ingenuity can possibly think of. These combinations the syndicates have not tried themselves. They are not in operation, say, in Germany or elsewhere, but the syndicates put them in their patents in obscure and vague terms so as to cover any possible invention that may be discovered afterwards in this country.
His announcement was greeted with glee by the small British chemical industry, and it resulted in the transfer of some German manufacturing capacity to the UK. In 1907 Hoechst and BASF, which had maintained their lucrative agreement on the production of indigo despite their participation in rival confederations back home, jointly established the Mersey Chemical Works at Ellesmere Port, near Liverpool, to make the dye for the UK market. In reality, this move was little more than a token nod toward British sensibilities because the Germans allowed the factory to produce only a very small proportion of the country’s needs (by 1913 the UK was still importing four times as much synthetic indigo from Germany as it was making locally), and of course all the profits still flowed back to the Rhineland. Nonetheless, the gesture emboldened the companies to cheekily send a barrel of the dye to the British government, marked with the words Made in England.
Although Lloyd George’s declaration applied only to manufacturing, it reflected a broader malaise in international relations and the general suspicion with which German interests were now being viewed by the rest of Europe. The continent was beginning to polarize. In Germany, where Kaiser Wilhelm II seemed to have abandoned the restraint and diplomatic ingenuity of the Bismarck years in favor of a more erratic belligerence, public opinion increasingly held that the country was being denied its rightful place at the economic and political top table. In Britain and France, the two major powers whose security was most obviously thr
eatened by German muscle flexing, an unhealthy chauvinism was developing, inflamed by the yellow press, which published lurid warnings about German militarism and its expansionist ambitions. At a time when books like Erskine Childers’s best-selling The Riddle of the Sands (1906) and William Le Queux’s Spies of the Kaiser (1909) were alarming British readers with tales of German plots, conspiracies, and invasion threats, German preeminence in the chemical sciences assumed a significance beyond the merely commercial.* Any future conflict would clearly be an industrialized conflict. The nation that commanded the resources, technology, and know-how to equip and support a war machine would surely have an advantage.
In the meantime, business was business and Bayer wasn’t the only German chemical company with momentous matters on its hands. One of its partners in the new Dreibund was in the process of making a scientific breakthrough of comparable magnitude to that of William Perkin half a century earlier. The discovery of a method to “fix” nitrogen would have wide-ranging implications for peace and war. It would also be crucial to the development of IG Farben.
* * *
THE EVENTS THAT led to this breakthrough began one evening in June 1898, when members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science gathered in Bristol to hear a lecture. There were few signs that the occasion would be especially memorable; it was just another of the regular get-togethers that academics and researchers seem to enjoy so much, an opportunity to hear a distinguished colleague expounding on his current work or airing his views on a topical scientific theme. Nonetheless, it promised to be interesting. The speaker was one of the country’s most eminent chemists, the recently knighted Sir William Crookes. Known for his breadth of interests, ranging from pure and applied science to the more esoteric study of psychical research, Crookes had won fame some years before for his discovery of thallium, a new metallic element. Since then much of his attention had been focused on two arcane fields of inquiry: how highly rarefied gases react to electricity and the composition of “rare earths”—elements so chemically similar to one another that special methods had to be devised for their separation. These were important matters, to be sure, and his research would one day have a significant bearing on the understanding of radioactive materials like uranium, but there must have been some that evening who were glad that he had chosen a more comprehensible subject for his talk. His topic was nitrogen—or rather the lack of it.
Nitrogen is as essential to plant and animal life as the air that we breathe. Indeed, 78 percent of the air we breathe is nitrogen. It is also vital to the successful cultivation of crops. Thousands of years ago farmers began habitually planting legumes (peas and beans) among cereal and rice crops because they had learned that somehow legumes replenished overworked soil. What they didn’t know was that certain bacteria, including some that lived on these plants, could absorb, or “fix,” nitrogen out of the air. It was this that helped fertilize their harvest. Manure and animal bones are also rich in fixed nitrogen and when spread on a field have a similarly beneficial effect. But the yield from all these sources is relatively small. Although it was more than sufficient until well beyond the medieval era, as the centuries advanced—and the world’s population grew and more land was cultivated to grow cereals—fresh sources of nitrogen had to be found. By the nineteenth century, when the burgeoning human population had increased demand for grain to unprecedented levels, the hunt had become so competitive that English gangs were traveling to the Continent to exhume cadavers that could be ground up for essential nutrients.
England “is robbing all other countries of their fertility,” wrote one prominent German chemist, Justus von Liebig. “She has turned up the battlefields of Leipzig and Waterloo and of Crimea. Already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away the skeletons of generations.… [She] removes from the shores of other countries the manurial equivalent of three and half million of men. Like a vampire she hangs from the neck of Europe.”
Of course, this lust for fertilizer wasn’t restricted to England. In China, human waste was regularly recycled in rice paddies, even though there were undeniable health risks associated with the practice. In nineteenth-century Paris, a million metric tons of horse dung were collected annually for the market gardens around the French capital. In America, an ever-lengthening railroad network hauled hundreds of thousands of bleached buffalo bones back to processing factories in the East.
Other parts of the world were more blessed. In the early 1850s a few barren islands off the coast of Peru were found to be hundreds of feet deep in guano, the nitrogen-rich droppings of countless generations of seabirds. The discovery sparked an extraordinary export trade that saw 20 million tons of the substance excavated and shipped off to the grain-hungry nations of the industrialized world. By 1870 this supply was all but exhausted and even an American government appeal to U.S. adventurers and merchant seamen—asking them to take possession (as a national resource) of any guano-rich islands they discovered—failed to yield more. Attention switched to Chile, the world’s last significant source of nitrates. Its deserts were rich in deposits of fossilized saltpeter (sodium nitrate), which had accumulated over millions of years. But even as the extraction of these deposits got under way and ships battled round the Horn to take the saltpeter back to Europe, anxiety persisted about what would happen when it, too, ran out.
It was this fear that most preoccupied Sir William Crookes when he stood up to deliver his speech in June 1898. He had thought long and hard about what he had to say and in the process had come to a startling yet inescapable conclusion. Sooner or later (about twenty years was his estimate) demand for organic nitrogen would outstrip supply. And this, as he explained to his increasingly uneasy listeners, would result in only one outcome: unless new sources could be found, the world—or at least the industrialized Western world—would face starvation. Nitrogen, he went on, was “vital to the progress of civilised humanity and unless we can class it among the certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world and will be squeezed out of existence by the races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life.”
For all his apocalyptic gloom, Crookes was a scientist, a rational man who believed that a solution could and would be found. The answer, he was convinced, lay in the discipline to which he had devoted much of his life. “It is the chemist who must come to the rescue,” he said. “It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned to plenty.” After all, no one should forget that nature had provided humankind with abundant supplies of nitrogen; it was everywhere, in the very air that everyone breathed. The only problem was how to tap it.
Even as his distinguished audience stumbled out into the night, greatly disturbed by what they had heard, Crookes’s remarks were finding their way to the newspapers and from there to the wider world. Such a dire prediction, from an internationally respected chemist, had considerable impact on the world’s scientific community. Researchers had been worrying away at the nitrogen problem for many years—and many had tried and failed to find a solution. But now Crookes had thrown down the gauntlet in terms that couldn’t be ignored. There had to be some way of getting nitrogen from the air. The time had come for science to meet that challenge.
It was easier said than done. As every chemist knows, atmospheric nitrogen (N2) is relatively inert. Its two atoms are so strongly bound that few biochemical reactions can break it. Lightning can occasionally crack it open, making an irregular contribution to Earth’s biological cycle through rainfall, but for the most part nitrogen is chemically inaccessible. Nineteenth-century scientists had been able to establish its composition but not to find a method of “fixing” it. They understood that any successful synthesis would probably have to involve the application of extraordinary pressures or perhaps the reproduction of the incredible electrical forces found in a great storm, but at the time of Crookes’s speech no one had yet been able to find a way of achieving either.
By 1903, however, it seemed th
at some progress was being made. In Norway that year, Kristian Birkeland and Samuel Eyde designed arc furnaces that formed nitric acid by passing an electric arc through the air—in effect, replicating the natural process of lightning’s action on atmospheric nitrogen, albeit on a much smaller scale. They established a company to develop the process industrially and attracted investment from around Europe, including a modest injection of cash from BASF, which was becoming interested in finding a commercial solution to the nitrates problem. But the power required for Birkeland and Eyde’s process was enormous; it could be made to work only at a site where electricity was abundant and extremely cheap, and even then the yields of nitrogen were very small. Although Norsk Hydro picked up the idea and built experimental plants at Notodden and Rjuken, by early 1908 it was apparent to most other investors, including BASF, that this route to synthetic nitrogen was not economically viable.
It would fall to a German scientist, Fritz Haber, to discover what has rightly been hailed as one of the most significant inventions of the twentieth century. Born in Breslau in 1868, Haber was destined for chemistry. His father, a Jewish businessman, had made a small fortune trading in synthetic dyestuffs and had set his heart on his son’s doing the same, but he believed that a solid understanding of the natural sciences would lay the groundwork for a successful career in the field. Thus Fritz had a typically excellent German education. He studied chemistry in Berlin under William Perkin’s former mentor, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, and then, with a brief interregnum for military service and an even briefer period working in his father’s business (which convinced both of them that an academic life would be more suitable), he began moving through the scientific ranks at some of the better-known universities: Heidelberg, Jena, and Zurich. Finally, he settled in Karlsruhe, at the city’s Technische Hochschule, where he would spend the next seventeen years as a teacher, researcher, and author of numerous papers on aspects of chemistry.
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