- Person
- Fritz Haber
- Lived
- 1868–1934
- Field
- Chemistry
- From
- German
The story
Firedamp, the methane gas that collects in coal mines, becomes explosive when it makes up between about 4 and 16 percent of the air. It caused many deadly explosions, and even after safety lamps came into use in the nineteenth century, explosions continued, so better ways of warning miners were still being sought.
In 1912, shortly after the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, Emperor Wilhelm II asked its director, Fritz Haber, to build a warning device for firedamp. Haber, the son of a Jewish merchant family from Breslau, had studied combustion for years at Karlsruhe.
Within a year he had developed a firedamp whistle and presented it to the emperor in a lecture on 28 October 1913, publishing a description in the journal Die Naturwissenschaften the same year. The idea was elegant. The pitch of a whistle depends on the speed of sound in the gas blowing through it, and sound travels faster in a methane mixture than in pure air. Two identical pipes, one blown with clean air and one with mine air, produce slightly different notes when methane is present, and the difference is heard as a beat. The whistle could signal methane from about 1 percent upward, well below the explosive range.
Haber worked hard to market the device and signed a contract with the Auergesellschaft, but it did not succeed in practice, because keeping the pipes calibrated under working conditions in a colliery proved too difficult. His Nobel biography also credits him with a quartz-thread manometer for measuring very low gas pressures, a useful laboratory tool.
Both reflected his lifelong habit of turning physical chemistry to practical ends. At Karlsruhe he had done fundamental research on the Bunsen flame, showing that a water-gas equilibrium is established in its luminous inner cone and that water-gas burns in its outer mantle, work that led to a chemical method of measuring flame temperatures. He also studied energy losses in engines and turbines. The firedamp whistle applied that knowledge of gases and flames to the safety of people working underground.
Why it matters
Haber's firedamp whistle was an inventive early attempt to use physical chemistry to warn miners of explosive gas before it could ignite.
About Fritz Haber
Nobel chemist whose ammonia synthesis made the fertilisers that feed billions, who also led Germany’s WWI poison-gas programme, and who was driven out by the Nazis.
More about Fritz Haber
- Fritz Haber's surface idea inspired LangmuirFritz Haber observed that the adsorbing power of a solid can come from unsaturated valence forces on its surface, an idea on which Irving Langmuir founded his theory of adsorption.
- Haber–Bosch fertiliser helps feed half the worldScaled up by Carl Bosch from 1913, Fritz Haber's ammonia process made cheap fertiliser possible. Food grown with it is estimated to support nearly half the world's population.
- Fritz Haber co-invented the glass electrodeWith his colleague Cremer, Fritz Haber invented the glass electrode for measuring the acidity of liquids, a device his Nobel biography describes as now widely used.
- Fritz Haber rebuilt his institute into a world centreIn the 1920s Fritz Haber reorganised his Berlin-Dahlem institute, giving directors such as James Franck and Michael Polanyi full freedom and making it an international centre of science.
- Fritz Haber linked electrochemistry to industryFritz Haber's 1898 textbook on technical electrochemistry and his discovery that controlling electrode potential yields specific products became classics of the field.
- Fritz Haber made ammonia from the air in 1909In 1909 Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol became the first to synthesise ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, solving a problem chemists had pursued for decades.
- Fritz Haber wrote a model book on gas reactionsFritz Haber's 1905 book Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions was later regarded as a model of accuracy and critical insight in chemical thermodynamics.
- Fritz Haber resigned rather than dismiss his Jewish staffOrdered by the Nazis in 1933 to dismiss Jewish employees, Fritz Haber tried to delay their departures until he could find them places, then resigned himself.
Sources
- Fritz Haber: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Firedamp whistle Wikipedia
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