Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/244

240 the biologist, we shall, however, be dependent on nitrogenous fertilizers; and one of the great tasks of the chemist is to cheapen such fertilizers by obtaining the nitrogen contained in them directly from the air. During the last ten years great progress has been made in this direction; and it remains to describe briefly, without entering into technical details, the general lines along which this problem has been successfully attacked.

Two kinds of processes have been developed. One of these has the object of producing nitric acid, a compound of water with one of the oxides of nitrogen. The other kind of process has for its object the production of ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. For use in a fertilizer the nitric acid, which is a liquid, or the ammonia, which is a gas, must of course be converted into a solid salt. This is most cheaply done by neutralizing the nitric acid with lime or the ammonia with sulfuric acid, yielding calcium nitrate or ammonium sulfate, respectively. Whether the nitrate or the ammonium salt is made the constituent of the fertilizer makes little difference; for, though plants directly assimilate the nitrogen only in the form of nitrate, yet there are always present in soils the so-called nitrifying bacteria, whose function it is to convert ammonium compounds into nitrates.

Nitric acid is a compound whose constituents, nitrogen, oxygen and water, are present in unlimited quantities in the air. The raw materials are available free of cost. The problem is therefore only to make them combine under economic conditions. The difficulty arises from the fact that nitrogen is an extremely stable substance; so that, instead of tending to form compounds with oxygen, the nitrogen oxides tend rather to break down into their elements, nitrogen and oxygen. Thus, scientific investigations have shown that if a mixture of these two gases in the best proportions is exposed to a temperature of 1500° centigrade, that is, to a white heat, only one third of one per cent, unites to form nitric oxide, however long the mixture be heated. But these investigations have also shown that while most compounds decompose with rise of temperature, this one, nitric oxide, becomes more stable, the higher the temperature. Thus at 3000° five per cent, of the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen will unite to form nitric oxide. To get a fair yield of our product we must therefore expose air to an enormously high temperature. But this isn't all; for we must cool off the gas without causing the nitric oxide which has been formed to break up again into nitrogen and oxygen. To do this, we must call to our aid another chemical principle, which is this: although the quantity of a product finally formed in a chemical process sometimes increases and sometimes (as in this case) decreases with falling temperature, yet the rate at which that product forms or decomposes always decreases very rapidly as the temperature is lowered. We must,