Beer, bread and bombs: why industrial foundations matter

So what does fertilizer have to do with your pint? The answer runs through a century of British industrial history, and along the way connects three things that on face value appear to have nothing to do with one another: beer, bread, and bombs.

Go back almost exactly a century from that World Cup to March 1918.

The First World War was still running, and Britain was worried about nitrates because nitrates were needed for explosives, and the country's supply depended heavily on shipping natural nitrate from Chile.

So the Ministry of Munitions approved a large new site at Grange Farm near the village of Billingham on the north bank of the Tees.

It was called the Government Nitrogen Factory.

The site was chosen for the sort of reasons that we would now call industrial cluster policy: hundreds of acres of flat land, deep water access on the Tees, raw materials close at hand, and electricity from a new power station.

The war thankfully ended before the plant produced anything.

The government sold the half-finished works, and in 1920, Brunimond bought it and formed a company called Synthetic Ammonia and Nitrates Limited.

It was set up to make ammonia as a feedstock for explosives and fertilizer.

By the middle of the 1920s, Billingham was producing.

In 1926, it became part of the newly created Imperial Chemical Industries, alongside Nobel Industries, then Britain's principal explosives manufacturer.

Over the following decades, Billingham became one of the great centers of the British chemical industry, employing thousands of people, making nitric, sulfuric, and phosphoric acids, methanol, and carbon dioxide alongside ammonia.

When the Second World War came, the same site supplied ammonia for explosives, produced high-octane aviation fuel, made Perspex for aircraft canopies, and even housed some of the earliest British work on an atomic bomb.

In two decades, Billingham made a transition from firepower to farming and then made it back again when the country needed it to.

It was conceived to help make bombs.

It became a system that helped make bread, and along the way, it also helped to make beer.

For most of the 20th century in Britain, those were not three industries linked by an interesting piece of chemistry.

They were one address, and much of it rested on a single molecule.

That molecule is ammonia, NH3, one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms.

Nitrogen makes up most of the atmosphere, but plants cannot use it directly in that form.

And for most of human history, that placed a hard ceiling on how much food we could grow.

Then Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a way of combining nitrogen from the air with hydrogen under high temperature and pressure.

The Haber-Bosch process turned the resulting ammonia into nitrogen fertilizer, and crop yields rise dramatically.

Today, billions of people are fed by crops grown with it.

That is the first part.

So what does fertilizer have to do with your pint? The answer runs through a century of British industrial history, and along the way connects three things that on face value appear to have nothing to do with one another: beer, bread, and bombs.

Go back almost exactly a century from that World Cup to March 1918.

The First World War was still running, and Britain was worried about nitrates because nitrates were needed for explosives, and the country's supply depended heavily on shipping natural nitrate from Chile.

So the Ministry of Munitions approved a large new site at Grange Farm near the village of Billingham on the north bank of the Tees.

It was called the Government Nitrogen Factory.

The site was chosen for the sort of reasons that we would now call industrial cluster policy: hundreds of acres of flat land, deep water access on the Tees, raw materials close at hand, and electricity from a new power station.

The war thankfully ended before the plant produced anything.

The government sold the half-finished works, and in 1920, Brunimond bought it and formed a company called Synthetic Ammonia and Nitrates Limited.

It was set up to make ammonia as a feedstock for explosives and fertilizer.

By the middle of the 1920s, Billingham was producing.

In 1926, it became part of the newly created Imperial Chemical Industries, alongside Nobel Industries, then Britain's principal explosives manufacturer.

Over the following decades, Billingham became one of the great centers of the British chemical industry, employing thousands of people, making nitric, sulfuric, and phosphoric acids, methanol, and carbon dioxide alongside ammonia.

When the Second World War came, the same site supplied ammonia for explosives, produced high-octane aviation fuel, made Perspex for aircraft canopies, and even housed some of the earliest British work on an atomic bomb.

In two decades, Billingham made a transition from firepower to farming and then made it back again when the country needed it to.

It was conceived to help make bombs.

It became a system that helped make bread, and along the way, it also helped to make beer.

For most of the 20th century in Britain, those were not three industries linked by an interesting piece of chemistry.

They were one address, and much of it rested on a single molecule.

That molecule is ammonia, NH3, one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms.

Nitrogen makes up most of the atmosphere, but plants cannot use it directly in that form.

And for most of human history, that placed a hard ceiling on how much food we could grow.

Then Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a way of combining nitrogen from the air with hydrogen under high temperature and pressure.

The Haber-Bosch process turned the resulting ammonia into nitrogen fertilizer, and crop yields rise dramatically.

Today, billions of people are fed by crops grown with it.

That is the first part.