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Just been helping my son with chemistry, and accidentally flipped the narrative. He was looking at the Haber–Bosch process for making ammonia. I asked him about what ammonia's good for, the timing of the development, the timing of World War 1...

He was so suddenly interested like he's never been interested in chemistry before.

Then we got onto older ways of extracting nitrates from urine, something that Germany also had an advantage in because they drank so much beer.

And then to the initial extraction of phosphorus.

And then to calculating that, if only one person were involved, it'd take about a decade of collecting urine to replicate Brand and Kunckel's work.

Apparently the chem teacher never talks about things like this.

Even though we've been talking about the importance of doing so since the 1990s, and it's supposedly REQUIRED by the national curriculum.

#school #chemistry #histSci #histSciTech