Musk seems like kind of a jerk who’s done a lot of good. How about someone who was not just a jerk but a genuinely evil son of a bitch who did incalculably more good than anyone else? Not only way more good than Musk, but more than Norman Borlaug, Deng Xiaoping, Jonas Salk, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and everyone else - they’re pikers next to this total asshole Fritz Haber. Haber was a famous guy by the time World War One rolled around. He signed a petition of prominent Germans calling for war. He was influential enough that his name on a petition meant something, so he’s got a tiny part of the responsibility for that horrendous catastrophe of a conflict. Then, when things weren’t going so well, he conceived, advocated, and implemented the idea of using poison gas to break the deadlocked trench warfare. He managed to produce the gas and the canisters, steamroll generals and politicians who had qualms about using poison gas, and personally oversee the use of gas at Ypres.

His wife, also a chemist and politically a pacifist, was so horrified by the whole thing that soon after he put his plan into action she shot herself in their garden.* Their 12 year old son Hermann heard the shot and came out to see her die. Duty called though, so Fritz left the son and the inconvenient mess in charge of servants and went off to try his gas on the Russians. The son later committed suicide himself, natch.

So how did this lovely guy become so famous and influential? He invented the Haber process. You may not be familiar with it, but the Haber process is part of you. In the last decades of the 19th century population was outstripping agriculture’s ability to feed people. Malthus’s predictions were coming true. One of the most precious commodities was guano - bird shit - to be used as fertilizer. It was well known that nitrogen-based fertilizer could hugely increase agricultural productivity, and that nitrogen was abundant in the atmosphere, but getting it out and into usable form was prohibitively energy intensive.

Haber invented an efficient process for doing it, inputting air and outputting ammonia. He won a Nobel prize for it but the prize is the least of it. The Haber process is responsible for making it possible for the Earth to support a large human population. There were about 1.6 billion humans when Haber invented it, there are about seven billion now. If not for Haber’s process the population could not have even doubled without starving ourselves into extinction. Haber-based ammonia production for agriculture is a huge industry today. A large percentage of the nitrogen in every human body was produced using his technology. It’s probable that you, me, and everyone else on Quora would not be alive, were it not for Fritz Haber. That asshole Fritz Haber. Just wanna share Quora stuff in reddit...