There is no doubt that if he had not solved the nitrogen-fixing problem, someone else would have, and it is certainly possible that someone else would have pushed the use of poison gas into practice. It is also generally simplistic to claim that any one thing greatly prolonged the war. 'Great men' and 'pivotal event' historiography is a simplistic way of looking at the past, but nevertheless, it is a simple historical fact that he was the person who did these two things, and the case for nitrogen-fixing extending the war is better than most other 'but for...' stories.

I think people take special people for granted. You can't say, for certain, that anyone would have figured out the nitrogen fixing problem _in a period of time when it would have been effective to have done so_. The entire world could have been blown up before someone came along to figure it out.

The world has yet to churn out another mind quite like Einstein's, that flips convention on its head, or opens up humankind's collective knowledge by an order of magnitude. Special people, like Einstein, this man, Norman Borlaug or Ada Lovelace, I think, may have just been the right people at the right moment.

You are right; I cannot say for certain that someone else would have solved the nitrogen fixing problem in time to save humanity from global starvation, but for it not to happen, it would have required a lot of chemists to all not perform the sort of experiments that chemists are trained, employed and choose to do.

Having read somewhat widely, as a kid, about the history of technology, I was struck by how often several people were working independently on the same ideas at the same time, but that is not so surprising once you realize that the timing is often determined by when some prerequisite knowledge became available, or some prerequisite capability was mastered. Einstein stands among the most original thinkers of all time, but even he was standing on the shoulders of people like Heaviside, Fitzgerald and Lorentz (and Maxwell, of course) - yet the first three, at least, are invisible in popular historiography.

I disagree. I think there are many minds that would be capable of what these people did (not everyone, certainly not myself, but thousands of people alive today).

It is a case of having the right person in the right place at the right time, Einstein would have not had his theories had he been around 20 years earlier, or if he had not had the opportunities that he did. And if he had not been around then I think it would have been others. It is about the environment, Calculus was developed by two people simultaneously.

As to why we haven't had someone who has done this, well who's to say that we haven't and they are just overlooked? Or that greater capital expenditure it has to be groups of people (finding DNA, cloning, Graphene, etc). Or that there has simply not been the right environment.

Where do you draw the line? Is John von Neumann in the list? What about Feynman? Do you include Go or chess players that changed the game? What about Castro who successfully kept independence from the superpower next door? Linus Torval has made amazing contributions to modern computing by BDFL. What about Shannon, the father of information theory, or the men behind RSA?

Draw a line between these and choosing what field of study or what kind of change to the world counts to make a "special person" changes the number of special people dramatically.

What the article takes pains to point out though was that despite competing gas technology, Haber not only invented but actively persuaded the German army to use it as an instrument of war. He did so in direct contravention not only to the rules of engagement at the time, but even the moral objections of his wife. This laid the groundwork for scientists in Nazi Germany to not only contribute their knowledge to war's death machine without remorse, but to feel compelled to do so as a moral good.

To put some of this into context, there were a lot of people saying that the world was going to run out of food soon and we couldn't sustain our growing population. It'd be as if someone today invented a solution to global warming, it was a problem everyone knew about and worried about to some extend.

It seems that he was lobbying hard for the use of the gas.

Yep. Prevailing military opinion against using poison gases could have changed over the course of the war, of course, but he brought both the technical knowhow and the outspoken advocacy. The Allies' first alleged use of poison gas turned out to be an unfounded rumour which Haber himself was responsible for disproving.

Didn't take the Allies long to muster a response though, and they had their own Nobel Laureate Victor Grignard to build chemical weapons for them.

He did it though. Assuming that anyone else could have done it or would have done is a bit presumptuous.

Look at the history of sound recording[0] for example. You can see that the technology that made it possible existed for years and years before anyone attempted such a feat. Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that.

What bugs me though is what are the things that could exist right now but are not because someone still didn't think about them.

>>Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that.

Reminds me of Hero's engine [1]. Had a single person decided to build a working industrial steam engine back then, then it is possible that the industrial revolution could've happened two thousand years ago.

I believe the technology to build it was there, nobody had the imagination to see the potential for this though.

Humanity missed its opportunity back then, thankfully we had another chance almost 1800 hundred years latter and this time there were people that seized the opportunity [2],[3]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine

Considering how fragmented the pre-modern historical record is and how little attention is paid to technology in most of the sources we do have, it's quite possible that someone did build a Newcomen style engine 2000 years ago, it could even have happened many times.

However, it was probably only worth using one once labor costs reached a certain threshold. e.g. if you were an ancient roman landlord with abundant slave labor, why would you go to the trouble and expense of building steam engines to remove water from your mines rather than just having some workers work the pumps?

Moreover a Newcomen engine was so inefficient that it was really only usable when sited right at a coal mine, and in ancient times there were plenty of surface coal sites that didn't require deep mines (and thus pumps).

It's hard to imagine someone leaping straight to a Watt engine, especially given the metallurgy required.

I think that people who are engineers or fascinated with engineering frequently dismiss or belittle economic and social context, and the interrelation of any new technology with all the other technology in the world. The idea of a steam engine producing the industrial revolution 2000 years ahead of time strikes me as incredible as the idea of producing a human from some DNA in a petri dish.

This has nothing to do with Hollywood. Looking at it from that perspective is blind to history and human accomplishment. That's (part of) what our species... does. Is it a good or a bad thing? This would be a very different planet - perhaps without computers or centralized governments or much else, if societies did not place considerable blame or praise on individuals or small groups for large events or discoveries.

That's another simplistic approach. You can place praise or blame without saying that they were literally indispensable for its existence. Making it happen a few months or years sooner is praiseworthy in itself.

I don't think you're following what I'm arguing from your response - let me re-state - I'm not saying that the "truth" is that Fritz Haber is the only one who could've "discovered" his procedure for ammonia, at any point, or even at any point in the 1910's; that is likely not the case in reality.

I am making a separate argument - this would not have been invented at all, yet, if humans, throughout history, did not celebrate or recognize specific individuals as being responsible for these monumental discoveries or events.

I understood what you wrote initially.

Then I will argue your initial response is a non-sequitur to my initial comment - it's not a question of whether of whether or not we "can" or "cannot" diminish one's role in something - we certainly can. But, we're a competitive species. I think it has been an important characteristic in our evolution. In the alternate reality where people don't take overstated credit for success, in whatever form, Haber and all the other scientists who probably grew up reading of the great scientists who came before them that they wanted to emulate may have been tribal village raiders (I'm exaggerating, very slightly). Frankly, any form of desire to see somebody else's limelight revoked likely stems from their own competitivity and insecurity.

It's not a non-sequitur; you just hadn't claimed that we needed to overstate the credit.

I'm skeptical. What leads you to conclude that we need to pretend that people did more than what they did, or otherwise we wouldn't have computers and governments? I'd say we have plenty of inventions more important than computers whose authors were never really recognized, at least in their lifetimes. Were the inventors of the toilet really hailed for their accomplishment?

Choosing the word "overstate" was extremely poor word choice on my part, given my argument. The "statedness" of the success is subjective, regardless.

If we, as a society, did not assign degrees of greatness to accomplishments, there would not really be any. You're free to disagree, but to me, this is an obvious conclusion of human nature and history. Do famous politicians deserve their place in history, given that their accomplishment is the result of thousands to hundreds of millions of people support them? Did Newton deserve his success? By his own word, he was standing on the shoulders of others. However, consider every scientist who followed him desiring to achieve his level of prominence - nearly every human who fervently applies himself to any single pursuit desires that, whether or not they will admit that to themselves or others. If history did not allow the idea of outliers, in favor of the argument that all discoveries were collective achievements or "an eventuality, regardless of who", Newton, and those after, would've had far fewer shoulders to stand on - those minds would've applied themselves elsewhere.

I am not arguing that we, as a society, assign the proper "weight of recognition" to an inventor, discoverer, politician during or after their lifetime - that is a separate question. The chain is regarding "whether or not we should assign large weights of recognition to individuals".

I'll agree to disagree rather than continue writing a thesis - I believe my perspective to be inalienably correct, though.

Not sure what "inalienably correct" means, but I guess it means you are not open to change your mind or open to debate, so I will just stand my point of view to justify my initial comment.

I didnt imply causation to Hollywood, I just used it as an adjective. I agree that storytelling with heroes personification is very common in humankind since always (since there is written documents at least). It happens that Hollywood became a thing by replicating this phenomena in fiction, so I think is very fit to use it as a qualifier.

But I disagree that this human characteristic is the cause behind human progress.

Collaboration was a human evolutionary advantage, so I think human are more naturally colaborative that competitive, at least intra tribe size levels.

I also think that humans seek recognition among peers - and a peer has a very broad and flexible definition, not necessarily recognition from history. So I disagree that highly focused scientists motivation is to be like historical figures. They want that recognition in life, from peers, not historians.

Still, I also think recognition from others is not the sole motivation for all human endeavors, not even the biggest factor.

The story isn’t about ammonia; it’s about Haber.

"@but there is this Hollywood simplistic approach where one man is responsible for all things [..] I don't subscribe to this way of looking into historical figures"

I applaud you for that, this gives some hope that not all is lost. A real historian can only be someone who loves the truth ( .. more than his personal well-beign)