User talk:Paul Wormer/scratchbook1
[http://books.google.nl/books?id=0ekNIaJX3-YC&pg=PP2&cd=1#v=onepage&q=Fritz%20Haber%3A%20Chemist
55r556777886434 %2C%20Nobel%20Laureate%2C%20German%2C%20Jew%3A%20A%20Biography&f=false0 01Ha=[ber (9 December 1868, Breslau – 29 January 1934 Basel) was a German chemist and a pioneer of chemical warfare. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from the chemical elements hydrogen and nitrogen.
Life
Fritz Haber was born into a Jewish family. His father, Siegfried Haber, ran a business for dye pigments, paints, and pharmaceuticals. For quite a number of years he also served as city councillor of Breslau (then a German city, now the Polish city of Wrocław). At Fritz's birth, serious medical complications occurred and the mother, Paula—née Haber, a cousin of Siegfried—died three weeks later. It seemed that Fritz's father blamed the child for the mother's death. This is probably the reason that father and son later in life never became close and that tensions between them arose often.
Haber attended the humanistic gymnasium St. Elizabeth in Breslau, where the curriculum contained German language and literature, Latin, Greek, mathematics and some physics, but hardly any chemistry. Fritz had a keen interest in chemistry, already as a school boy he performed chemical experiments. After finishing the gymnasium (September 29, 1886 at the age of seventeen) he went to the Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität (usually briefly referred to as the University of Berlin) to study chemistry under August Wilhelm von Hofmann. This choice was somewhat against his father's wishes who had preferred a commercial education for his son. Von Hofmann, who was close to seventy at the time, was a poor teacher, the chemistry lab was in a bad shape, and altogether Haber found his first semester in Berlin rather disappointing. He decided to switch to the University of Heidelberg, where he arrived in the summer semester of 1887, to continue his studies under Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. From mid 1889 until mid 1890 Haber spent time in the army.
In the fall of 1890 he went back to Berlin, this time to the Technische Hochschule of Charlottenburg (now the Technical University Berlin). He worked here under Carl Liebermann who had a cross appointment at the Berlin University. Charlottenburg did not have the the right to grant doctorates (it received it later, in 1899). Having done his thesis work at Charlottenburg, Haber received formally his doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of Berlin (May 1891) on basis of a thesis entitled Über einige Derivate des Piperonal (on some derivatives of Piperonal).