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They had succeeded so far that the Kaiser when he
declared war might well have considered himself the Prince of the Power
of the Air. He had a fleet of Zeppelins and he had means for the
fixation of nitrogen such as no other nation possessed. The Zeppelins
burst like wind bags, but the nitrogen plants worked and made Germany
independent of Chile not only during the war, but in the time of peace.
Germany during the war used 200,000 tons of nitric acid a year in
explosives, yet her supply of nitrogen is exhaustless.
[Illustration: World production and consumption of fixed inorganic
nitrogen expressed in tons nitrogen
From _The Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry_, March,
1919.]

Nitrogen is free as air. That is the trouble; it is too free. It is
fixed nitrogen that we want and that we are willing to pay for; nitrogen
in combination with some other elements in the form of food or
fertilizer so we can make use of it as we set it free. Fixed nitrogen in
its cheapest form, Chile saltpeter, rose to $250 during the war.


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