ABSTRACT

Haber (hah-ber), the son of a merchant, was born at Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland. He was educated at Berlin, Heidelberg, Charlottenburg, and Jena, and in 1894 he became an assistant in physical chemistry at the Technical Institute, Karlsruhe, where he remained until 1911, being promoted to a professorship in 1906. He moved to Berlin in 1911 to become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry. Though an intensely patriotic German he was also a Jew and with the rise of anti-Semitism he resigned his post in 1933 and went into exile in England, where he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. He died in Basel en route to Italy.