The history of the Haber process begins with the invention of the Haber process at the dawn of the twentieth century. The process allows the economical fixation of atmospheric dinitrogen in the form of ammonia, which in turn allows for the industrial synthesis of various explosives and nitrogen fertilizers, and is probably the most important industrial process developed during the twentieth century.
Well before the start of the industrial revolution, farmers would fertilize the land in various ways, mainly using feces and urine, well aware of the benefits of an intake of essential nutrients for plant growth. Although it was frowned upon, farmers took it upon themselves to fertilize their fields using natural means and remedies that had been passed down from generation to generation. The 1840s works of Justus von Liebig identified nitrogen as one of these important nutrients. The same chemical compound could already be converted to nitric acid, the precursor of gunpowder and powerful explosives like TNT and nitroglycerine. Scientists also already knew that nitrogen formed the dominant portion of the atmosphere, but manmade chemistry had yet to establish a means to fix it.
Then, in 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber successfully fixed atmospheric nitrogen in a laboratory. This success had extremely attractive military, industrial and agricultural applications. In 1913, barely five years later, a research team from BASF, led by Carl Bosch, developed the first industrial-scale application of the Haber process, sometimes called the Haber–Bosch process.
The industrial production of nitrogen prolonged World War I by providing Germany with the gunpowder and explosives necessary for the war effort even though it no longer had access to guano. During the interwar period, the lower cost of ammonia extraction from the virtually inexhaustible atmospheric reservoir contributed to the development of intensive agriculture and provided support for worldwide population growth. During World War II, the efforts to industrialize the Haber process benefited greatly from the Bergius process, allowing Nazi Germany access to the synthesized fuel produced by IG Farben, thereby decreasing oil imports.
In the early twenty-first century, the effectiveness of the Haber process (and its analogues) is such that these processes satisfy more than 99% of global demand for synthetic ammonia, a demand which exceeds 100 million tons annually. Nitrogen fertilizers and synthetic products, such as urea and ammonium nitrate, are mainstays of industrial agriculture, and are essential to the nourishment of at least two billion people. Industrial facilities using the Haber process and its analogues have a significant ecological impact. Half of the nitrogen in the great quantities of synthetic fertilizers employed today is not assimilated by plants but finds its way into rivers and the atmosphere as volatile chemical compounds.