After reading and enjoying Hager’s Demon Under the Microscope, I was curious about his other work.  The Alchemy of Air is about how we made the earth sustain more than 4 billion people by taking nitrogen out of the air and turning it into fertilizer. At the turn of the 20th century, mass starvation was a real threat–the earth simply couldn’t yield enough food to keep up with the growing human population.  So chemists are tasked with solving this very, very big problem.  Two chemists in particular, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, discover a way to take nitrogen from the air, creating […]