Nitrogen Capture

Description

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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xxi Introduction: Food or Famine (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 1-7 Agricultural Chemistry (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 9-18 The Quest for Fixed Nitrogen (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 19-37 Ammonium Sulphate (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 39-48 Electricity and the Chemical Industry (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 49-92 The Direct Synthesis of Ammonia (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 93-127 A Time of Guns and Grain (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 129-149 Wartime Expansion of the Nitrogen Industry (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 151-190 Billingham: “The Synthetic” (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 191-223 Non-BASF Ammonia Technologies (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 225-264 The United States (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 265-279 New Ideologies and National Security in the 1920s (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 281-294 International Conferences, and an Adriatic Cruise (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 295-309 Synthetic Nitrogen in the Soviet Union (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 311-327 Imperial Japan: From Cyanamide to Synthetic Ammonia (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 329-346 High-Pressure Synthesis and Later Developments (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 347-360 Nobel Prizes and a New Technology (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 361-369 A Legacy of Synthetic Nitrogen (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 371-378 Catching Up: Mainly Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 379-381 Conclusion (Anthony S. Travis)....Pages 383-385 Back Matter ....Pages 387-411