Transcript
Introduction
“This is the story of 2 men who invented a way to turn air into bread, built factories the size of small cities, made enormous fortunes, helped engineer the deaths of millions of people, and saved the lives of billions more. Their work stands, I believe, as the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life and death importance for the largest number of people. Most people do not know the names of either the men or their invention. Their work lives today in the form of giant factories, usually located in remote areas that drink rivers of water, inhale oceans of air, and burn about 1% of all the Earth's energy. If all the machines these men invented were shut down today, more than 2 billion people would starve to death.
Carl Bosch led me into this story. I learned quickly that he was a man of contradictions, a business mogul who won a Nobel Prize, and an ardent anti-Nazi who founded and led a most infamous Nazi firm. Bosch is one of the great mystery men of the 20th century. He kept a very low public profile, avoided meetings, seemed to prefer machines to people, and hid away as much as possible in his villa, which he turned into a private playground equipped with personal laboratories, museum-quality collections, and a research-grade astronomical observatory. Fritz Haber who was as public as Bosch was private, a scientist who reveled in attention, sought glory, drank, smoked, partied, hobnobbed with royalty, and love making an impression in his hand-tailored military uniform, but he too had his mysteries.
How could a man who helped feed the world also be attacked as a war criminal after World War I? What was he doing in a secret laboratory hidden on an ocean liner? These men were giants of science. Their careers took off after their invention of the air-to-bread machine, and they both attempted even bigger things. They pioneered new ways of doing science, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and made life-or-death decisions. Haber and Bosch are, in many ways, responsible for creating the modern chemical industry”.
Okay. So that is an excerpt from the book that I read this week, and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the Alchemy of Air: A Jewish genius, a Doomed Tycoon and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, and it was written by Thomas Hager. So this is one of the most unique, complicated, engrossing stories I've ever read. I couldn't put the book down. It's like 300 pages long, and I read it in two days. And something happened to me, so I'm going to jump into the book in a minute, but I got to tell you what happened to me, which is unusual.