Fritz Haber's Bread and Poison
Coming to Wonder People on 24 November 2026.
Between 1909 and 1934, the chemist Fritz Haber pulls bread out of thin air and then poison out of the same gift. The story opens in Karlsruhe, where a dropped steel cylinder nearly kills the men who will shortly learn to bind nitrogen from the atmosphere; it travels to the roaring high-pressure yards of BASF at Oppau, to the vast fertilised rye fields that will feed a continent, to the mobilisation crowds under the Brandenburg Gate, to a frozen test range near Cologne where Haber's wife Clara burns her hand shutting a leaking chlorine valve, and to the parapet at Langemarck on 22 April 1915 where a green wall rolls into the Ypres salient. The reckoning follows: a closed coffin carried out of a Dahlem garden, a trunk dragged along the Cam by a man nobody in England will shake hands with, and a collapse on a bridge over the Rhine at Basel, where the last of his papers goes into the water.
About this story
- Length
- 10 illustrated pages
Who appears
- Fritz Haber — Chemist; synthesiser of ammonia and director of Germany's gas warfare
- Clara Immerwahr — Haber's wife; doctor of chemistry who opposes the gas work
- Robert Le Rossignol — Haber's English laboratory assistant who builds the apparatus
- Carl Bosch — BASF engineer who scales the process to industry
- Otto Hahn — Younger chemist; Haber's gas-pioneer officer and reluctant witness
What happens on 24 November 2026
This story is finished and scheduled. On 24 November 2026 it opens here in full — every page illustrated — as part of Wonder People. Nothing on this page is a placeholder: the story exists, it has been reviewed, and this is its address.
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