Nitrogen Capture: The Growth of an International Industry (1900–1940)

This monograph provides an account of how the synthetic nitrogen industry became the forerunner of the 20th-century chemical industry in Europe, the United States and Asia. Based on an earlier SpringerBrief by the same author, which focused on the period of World War I, it expands considerably on the international aspects of the development of the synthetic nitrogen industry in the decade and a half following the war, including the new technologies that rivalled the Haber-Bosch ammonia process. Travis describes the tremendous global impact of fixed nitrogen (as calcium cyanamide and ammonia), including the perceived strategic need for nitrogen (mainly for munitions), and, increasingly, its role in increasing crop yields, including in Italy under Mussolini, and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The author also reviews the situation in Imperial Japan, including the earliest adoption of the Italian Casale ammonia process, from 1923, and the role of fixed nitrogen in the industrialization of colonial Korea from the late 1920s. Chemists, historians of science and technology, and those interested in world fertilizer production and the development of chemical industry during the first four decades of the twentieth century will find this book of considerable value.  

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Food or Famine.- Agricultural Chemistry.- The Quest for Fixed Nitrogen.- Ammonium Sulphate.- Electricity and the Chemical Industry.- The Direct Synthesis of Ammonia.- A Time of Guns and Grain.- Wartime Expansion of the Nitrogen Industry.- Billingham: "The Synthetic".- Non-BASF Ammonia Technology and Ammonia Oxidation.- The United States.- New Ideologies and National Security in the 1920s.- International Conferences, and an Adriatic Cruise.- Synthetic Nitrogen in the Soviet Union.- Imperial Japan: From Cyanamide to Synthetic Ammonia.- High-Pressure Synthesis and Later Developments.- Nobel Prizes and a New Technology.- A Legacy of Synthetic Nitrogen.- Catching up: Mainly Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union.- Conclusion.

About the Author :
Anthony S. Travis is deputy director of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published extensively on the history of chemistry and chemical technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Travis is recipient of four awards for his contributions to the history of chemistry. He has edited and co-edited several volumes and special issues of journals dealing with the history of science, technology and the environment. Publications include: The Rainbow Makers; The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Lehigh: Lehigh University Press, 1993); (with Carsten Reinhardt) Heinrich Caro and the Creation of Modern Chemical Industry (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); Dyes Made in America, 1915-1980: The Calco Chemical Company, American Cyanamid, and the Raritan River (Jerusalem: Edelstein Center/Hexagon Press, 2004); and most recently The Synthetic Nitrogen Industry in World War I: Its Emergence and Expansion (Heidelberg: Springer, 2015).