In a scientific sense, both Haber and Bosch made substantial contributions to industrial chemistry. Haber himself pioneered a sparsely used technology—cone valves—in his initial prototype, while Bosch would later receive the Nobel prize for the advances to high pressure chemistry he made in the process of scaling up Haber’s invention (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2025, p.1).
On the other hand, while it is difficult to assert with confidence that a new discovery has directly “harmed” science in some way, the same cannot be said of the invention’s consequences
The first World War has buried dozens of millions of people—many of them great minds, who could have given much to their respective fields of science had their lives not been cut short. One such victim was Henry Moseley, a physicist who was known for deriving the modern defy atomic number (Moseley, 1913, p.1024). His death, as well asmany others like him, can be directly attributed to the Haber-Bosch process, as its nitrates were a primary driver of the German war machine (Erisman et al., 2008, p.637).
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