The story of Fritz Haber’s work to feed humanity on the one hand and gas it on the other lies at the center of Frank A. von Hippel’s The Chemical Age. For von Hippel, a professor of ecotoxicology at Northern Arizona University, the story turns out to be an unusually personal one. Von Hippel’s great-grandfather was James Franck, a German physicist who won his own Nobel Prize, in 1925, for his research on electrons. During World War I, Franck was assigned to Haber’s institute in Berlin. Among his duties was testing the efficacy of gas masks and filters. (Other scientists on the testing crew included Otto Hahn, who received a Nobel Prize in physics in 1944, and Hans Geiger, who later invented the Geiger counter.) The testing was performed by sealing crew members into a room, filling it with poison gas, and having them stay there until they felt their masks starting to fail. Needless to say, the work was extremely dangerous. Had things gone ever so slightly differently, von Hippel might never have been born.
Von Hippel is interested in the ways people have solved problems with chemicals and, in the process, created new problems. He introduces his book with the example of Thomas Midgely Jr., who, in 1921, discovered that he could eliminate “knocking”—essentially tiny explosions—in car engines by lacing gasoline with tetraethyl lead. Over the next fifty years, some six trillion gallons of leaded gasoline were produced and combusted. Lead is toxic—in the course of his research, Midgely himself suffered lead poisoning—and the price of eliminating knocking turned out to be neurological damage in kids all over the world. (Studies suggest that this damage persists into adulthood.) But Midgely was just getting going.
Early refrigerators relied on noxious chemicals, like methyl chloride and sulfur dioxide. After several people were killed by appliances leaking methyl chloride, Midgely went searching for a replacement that would be nontoxic and also chemically inert. In 1928 he and his team came up with the world’s first chlorofluorocarbon, or CFC. For marketing purposes, the compound was dubbed Freon.
Freon was a giant step forward for Frigidaire, but a great step back for planet earth. Released into the air, the compound made its way to the stratosphere, where it damaged the ozone layer, which protects the globe from ultraviolet radiation. The first scientist to appreciate the impact of CFCs on the stratosphere was F. Sherwood Rowland, a chemistry professor at the University of California Irvine. One night Rowland came home from his lab and told his wife, “The work is going very well, but it looks like the end of the world.” (For his insight, Rowland, too, received a Nobel Prize, in 1995.) By the time Rowland’s calculations were confirmed, in the mid-1980s, a large “hole” had opened up in the ozone layer over Antarctica. The environmental historian J.R. McNeill has observed that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history.”