Karlsruhe, and then again on arrival in Berlin, he and his assistants
11 had
completed the work on ammonia, part of which was the subject of their
dissertations and which incidentally fully confirmed the accuracy of Robert Le
Rossignol’s experimental figures.
12 This material, together with the account
he and Le Rossignol wrote in the summer of 1909 (Chap. 8), was sent to
Ludwigshafen with the urgent request for permission to publish as soon as
possible. So much time had passed and Haber became desperate to publicly
establish his provenance in this matter. Very little of what the BASF had
achieved to date had escaped into the public domain; it was still very much a
secret process and the patent department at the BASF were determined to
keep it so, repeatedly objecting to various passages in these papers and
demanding changes. Eventually they relented and permitted aspects of his
research to become public. What eventually followed was seven papers
published consecutively with his assistants from 1914 through to 1915 in
Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie under the title ‘Untersuchungen Über
Ammoniak: Sieben Mitteilungen’, (Investigations on Ammonia: Seven
Communications).
13 These publications were subsequently referred to in the
Nobel Award Ceremony Speech on 01 June 1920 when Haber received the
Nobel Prize. However, from the BASF’s point of view these papers were
largely benign; simply academic studies examining for example uranium as a
catalyst or more accurate measurements for heat capacity. But the seminal
work on the subject was published by Haber jointly with Robert Le Rossignol
a little earlier in 1913, in Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie (Chap. 8), and for the
first time the detail of their work in Karlsruhe was also made available to the
English-speaking scientific world through the Journal of Industrial and
Engineering Chemistry (Chap. 8), in April 1913. Even in London, The Times
Engineering Supplement on Wednesday 28 May 1913 ran a detailed article
describing this work, clearly identifying ‘the Englishman’, Le Rossignol as
Haber’s partner. However, some months earlier in September 1912, at the
Eighth International Congress of Applied Chemistry in New York City,
Bernthsen had already described aspects of ‘his’ process for synthetic
ammonia. His paper was reported in detail in the New York Times on 12
September 1912 under the heading;
12 Berlin 1911–1914
227
11 had
completed the work on ammonia, part of which was the subject of their
dissertations and which incidentally fully confirmed the accuracy of Robert Le
Rossignol’s experimental figures.
12 This material, together with the account
he and Le Rossignol wrote in the summer of 1909 (Chap. 8), was sent to
Ludwigshafen with the urgent request for permission to publish as soon as
possible. So much time had passed and Haber became desperate to publicly
establish his provenance in this matter. Very little of what the BASF had
achieved to date had escaped into the public domain; it was still very much a
secret process and the patent department at the BASF were determined to
keep it so, repeatedly objecting to various passages in these papers and
demanding changes. Eventually they relented and permitted aspects of his
research to become public. What eventually followed was seven papers
published consecutively with his assistants from 1914 through to 1915 in
Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie under the title ‘Untersuchungen Über
Ammoniak: Sieben Mitteilungen’, (Investigations on Ammonia: Seven
Communications).
13 These publications were subsequently referred to in the
Nobel Award Ceremony Speech on 01 June 1920 when Haber received the
Nobel Prize. However, from the BASF’s point of view these papers were
largely benign; simply academic studies examining for example uranium as a
catalyst or more accurate measurements for heat capacity. But the seminal
work on the subject was published by Haber jointly with Robert Le Rossignol
a little earlier in 1913, in Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie (Chap. 8), and for the
first time the detail of their work in Karlsruhe was also made available to the
English-speaking scientific world through the Journal of Industrial and
Engineering Chemistry (Chap. 8), in April 1913. Even in London, The Times
Engineering Supplement on Wednesday 28 May 1913 ran a detailed article
describing this work, clearly identifying ‘the Englishman’, Le Rossignol as
Haber’s partner. However, some months earlier in September 1912, at the
Eighth International Congress of Applied Chemistry in New York City,
Bernthsen had already described aspects of ‘his’ process for synthetic
ammonia. His paper was reported in detail in the New York Times on 12
September 1912 under the heading;
12 Berlin 1911–1914
227