F Fluorine

Billions of people today owe their lives to a single development now a century old. In 1909 German chemist Fritz Haber of the University of Karlsruhe figured out a way to transform nitrogen gas--which is copious in the ambiance but nonreactive and ergo unavailable to most living organisms--into ammonia, the functioning ingredient in spurious fertilizer. The world’s skill to grow subsistence exploded 20 years later, when match German scientist Carl Bosch developed a scenario for implementing Haber’s idea on an industrial raise.

Over the ensuing decades new factories transformed ton after ton of industrial ammonia into fertilizer, and today the Haber-Bosch prevarication commands substantial integrity as one of the most significant boons to influential haleness in human history. As a atlas of the grassy revolution, synthetic fertilizer enabled farmers to alter infertile lands into fruitful fields and to flourish crop after crop in the same mud without waiting for nutrients to regenerate obviously. As a result, extensive folk skyrocketed from 1.6 billion to six billion in the 20th century.