Catalysis

The old complaint that things can't be run on air is thoroughly exploded. Chemists have for years been making some most important compounds out of the raw material of air. "Free" oxygen and nitrogen in the air, for instance, can be "fixed" by a gigantic electric arc into nitric oxide, from which nitric acid and nitrates (valuable fertilizers) are made.

Then in 1914 Fritz Haber, clever German necromancer, found that nitrogen gas can be captured in another way--by combining it with hydrogen to form ammonia. Instead of electricity, the Haber process makes use of an agent called a "catalyst," which is a substance that by its mere presence causes the union of two other elements. Efficient catalysts, or as Dr. E. E. Slosson calls them, the "good mixers" of chemical society, are expensive. Haber used uranium, platinum or some other rare and finely divided metal. When the nitrogen and hydrogen, after being elaborately purified, mixed in proper proportions, compressed, and heated to 1,300 degrees F., are passed over the uranium, the resulting gas contains from 4% to 8% of ammonia, which can be condensed to a liquid, used in refrigeration, etc., or further transformed by the Ostwald process (another catalytic), into nitric acid. The Haber process was the industrial and agricultural mainstay of Germany in the War. Shut off from her tremendous imports of fertilizers and explosives, her biggest dye-works, the Badische Anilin und Soda-Fabrik, remodeled its plant to manufacture fixed nitrogen and nitrates, and the Central Empires became chemically independent of the rest of the world.

Chemists of all nations have been seeking to improve the existing methods of nitrogen fixation. Last week the most important discovery since Haber's was announced from the fixed nitrogen research laboratory of the Chemical Warfare Service of the U. S. Army, at Washington, by Dr. Arthur B. Lamb, director of the laboratory, and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. A new catalyst has been found to unite the atoms of nitrogen and hydrogen into the molecule of ammonia. It yields 14% of ammonia, twice the amount given by the Haber process. The nature of the catalyst was not announced, but it has far greater durability, and will make possible explosives and fertilizers both more effective and much cheaper than any now existing.