Fertilizers; A history

choi

Ruth Defries, Progress Is Rooted in Fertilizer; The historical quest to enrich soils how our knack for problem-solving. Wall Street Journal, Oct 11, 2014.
online.wsj.com/articles/how-humans-give-mother-nature-a-helping-hand-1412953233

Excerpt in the window of print: From pungent ‘night soil’ to ground-up bones.

Note:
(a) “Flush toilets came into vogue. The cycle connecting city and countryside was broken. A new solution to keep soil fertile arose from an unexpected source. In the early 19th century, the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt journeyed to South America to collect specimens
(i) guano
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano
(section 2 History)
(A) saltpeter (n; from Medieval Latin sal petrae, literally, salt of the rock)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/saltpeter
(B) caliche (n; American Spanish, from Spanish, flake of lime, from cal lime, from Latin calx)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caliche
(ii)
(A) Justus von Liebig (1803-1873; considered the "father of the fertilizer industry" for his discovery of nitrogen as an essential plant nutrient)  Wikipedia
(B) Kelpie Wilson, The 19th Century Roots of Biochar--A History. undated
greenyourhead.typepad.com/files/the-roots-of-biochar.pdf
("Justus von Liebig[:] Justus Liebig is recognized as one of the first genuine experimental chemists. * * * Beginning of Chemical Agriculture[:] Through his experimental work, Liebig established the 'law of the minimum,' that states that plant growth is constrained by the least available nutrient in the soil. These discoveries spurred a growing fertilizer industry that mined and shipped huge amounts of guano, bonemeal, lime and other fertilizers from all parts of the world to fertilize the fields of Europe and eliminate the need for crop rotations and fallow periods to replenish the soil")
(C) Try as I may, I can not find what year he formulated law of the minimum.

choi

(b) “Farmers were relying on another source [besides guano] around the same time: crushed animal bones, which yielded phosphorus needed for healthy soil. Littered bones left over from the slaughter of bison were scattered across the North American prairie. Bone pickers made a few dollars gathering the remains and loading them onto trains headed east. But like guano, the supply of bones couldn’t keep up with demand.

Bones are essentially calcium phosphate.

(c) “Along with phosphorus, nitrogen was an essential component of fertilizer, and some scientists tried to fashion nitrogen gas extracted from the air into a fertilizer that plants could take up in their roots. Fritz Haber of Germany finally discovered a way to do this in the early 20th century, but it took enormous amounts of energy and big factories to produce sacks of fertilizer. Haber’s technology was adapted to make bombs in the first and second world wars.”
(i) Fritz Haber (1868 – 1934; a German chemist of Jewish origin who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development for synthesizing ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives)
(ii) Haber process
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

“The catalyst is actually slightly more complicated than pure iron. It has potassium hydroxide added to it as a promoter - a substance that increases its efficiency.”
(iii)
(A) The German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) surname Haber: "Middle High German haber(e) ‘oats,’ modern German Hafer"
(B) The Dutch and north German surname Bosch: "from Middle Dutch bussch, meaning ‘wood’ rather than ‘bush’"
(iv) What year?

Fritz Haber - Biographical. NobelPrize.org, undated
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ ... 1918/haber-bio.html
(“In 1905 he had published his book on the thermodynamics of technical gas reactions, in which he recorded the production of small amounts of ammonia from N2 and H2 * * * This resulted in the establishment, with the cooperation of Bosch and Mittasch, of the Oppau and Leuna Ammonia Works, which enabled Germany to prolong the First World War when, in 1914, her supplies of nitrates for making explosives had failed”)