8.3 At Last …. the Breakthrough
At this point in his career, Haber was recognised as a diligent and innovative
practitioner of physical science and this led to many opportunities for consultancy. One such position was with the Auergesellschaft Company of
Berlin, investigating new and novel materials as potential filaments for electric
light bulbs—a highly competitive research area at the time. The company was
founded by the fabulously wealthy Jewish banker and entrepreneur
(Geheimrat) Leopold Koppel, together with the Austrian chemist Karl Auer
von Welsbach. The company’s research interests were in the areas of gas
mantles, luminescence, incandescence, the rare earth elements and radioactivity—including uranium and thorium. In 1908 the Auer offered Haber a
position as scientific/technical consultant through which—purely by chance
—he had access to ‘exotic’ materials that he could select as potential catalysts.
One such material was osmium, another was uranium. The two elements
however differed markedly in provenance. Osmium was rare, just a hundred
kilograms existed in the whole world, spent or broken bulbs being bought up
by the company to recover the metal. The Auergesellschaft however had
much more uranium, essentially a ‘waste’ product left over from their process
for extracting radium from uranite.
Haber’s desperate search for an effective catalyst had eliminated many of
the obvious candidates and led him to consider the unconventional.
Therefore, early in 1909 he and Robert decided to examine finely ground
osmium
33 in their ‘furnace’. The result was encouraging. Even better than
that, osmium appeared to be far and away the best ‘contact substance’ they
had yet encountered, converting around 8% of the nitrogen/hydrogen mixture into ammonia at about 175 atm—and at temperatures as low as 500–
600 °C, about double what they have previously achieved.
7 It was at this
point, and with such ‘high’ yields, that Robert suggested separating the newly
formed ammonia by liquefaction, and he modified the circulation machine to
accommodate his innovation—developing the ‘cold regenerator’ at the same
time and probably incorporating the cooling devices supplied with the
compressor.
According to Robert’s account,
10 the modified circulation machine was far
from its final form when in the third week of March 1909 the two men
decided to move on anyway, placing finely divided osmium in the contact
chamber of its ‘furnace’. The ‘furnace’ was then reassembled and the bolts
tightened. The compressor brought the gas from the gasometer to a pressure
of *200 atm. The apparatus was evacuated, the pressurised gas admitted and
8 The Big Fix …
171
At this point in his career, Haber was recognised as a diligent and innovative
practitioner of physical science and this led to many opportunities for consultancy. One such position was with the Auergesellschaft Company of
Berlin, investigating new and novel materials as potential filaments for electric
light bulbs—a highly competitive research area at the time. The company was
founded by the fabulously wealthy Jewish banker and entrepreneur
(Geheimrat) Leopold Koppel, together with the Austrian chemist Karl Auer
von Welsbach. The company’s research interests were in the areas of gas
mantles, luminescence, incandescence, the rare earth elements and radioactivity—including uranium and thorium. In 1908 the Auer offered Haber a
position as scientific/technical consultant through which—purely by chance
—he had access to ‘exotic’ materials that he could select as potential catalysts.
One such material was osmium, another was uranium. The two elements
however differed markedly in provenance. Osmium was rare, just a hundred
kilograms existed in the whole world, spent or broken bulbs being bought up
by the company to recover the metal. The Auergesellschaft however had
much more uranium, essentially a ‘waste’ product left over from their process
for extracting radium from uranite.
Haber’s desperate search for an effective catalyst had eliminated many of
the obvious candidates and led him to consider the unconventional.
Therefore, early in 1909 he and Robert decided to examine finely ground
osmium
33 in their ‘furnace’. The result was encouraging. Even better than
that, osmium appeared to be far and away the best ‘contact substance’ they
had yet encountered, converting around 8% of the nitrogen/hydrogen mixture into ammonia at about 175 atm—and at temperatures as low as 500–
600 °C, about double what they have previously achieved.
7 It was at this
point, and with such ‘high’ yields, that Robert suggested separating the newly
formed ammonia by liquefaction, and he modified the circulation machine to
accommodate his innovation—developing the ‘cold regenerator’ at the same
time and probably incorporating the cooling devices supplied with the
compressor.
According to Robert’s account,
10 the modified circulation machine was far
from its final form when in the third week of March 1909 the two men
decided to move on anyway, placing finely divided osmium in the contact
chamber of its ‘furnace’. The ‘furnace’ was then reassembled and the bolts
tightened. The compressor brought the gas from the gasometer to a pressure
of *200 atm. The apparatus was evacuated, the pressurised gas admitted and
8 The Big Fix …
171