. Review of reviews and world's work . een 1867 and 1916 we used about 8,040,-217 tons, costing $261,999,000. Our im-portations in 1913 amounted to 625,000 tons,valued at $21,630,000. Whenever you eata piece of bread rest assured that you havepaid your share of Chiles tax. ONLY THE AIR CAN HELP US The Chilean nitrate beds are not inex-haustible. Some time in the present cen-tury all their nitrogen will have been some cheap way of reducing the freenitrogen of the air to solid form is inventedthe world must starve. Every tree in the forest, every wild plant,must assimilate nitrogen
. Review of reviews and world's work . een 1867 and 1916 we used about 8,040,-217 tons, costing $261,999,000. Our im-portations in 1913 amounted to 625,000 tons,valued at $21,630,000. Whenever you eata piece of bread rest assured that you havepaid your share of Chiles tax. ONLY THE AIR CAN HELP US The Chilean nitrate beds are not inex-haustible. Some time in the present cen-tury all their nitrogen will have been some cheap way of reducing the freenitrogen of the air to solid form is inventedthe world must starve. Every tree in the forest, every wild plant,must assimilate nitrogen from the soil. Howdid nature place it there in exactly the rightchemical combination? Hers is a very slowprocess. She snaps her fingers at time. Amillion years is to her what a second is tous. Whenever lightning flashes, nature isfixing atmospheric nitrogen. A black cloudlooms up on the horizon. The sultry aijis charged with electricity. Suddenly ther^comes a blinding flash. A huge electric,spark has fixed a scarcely measurable amount. BIRKELAND-EYDE ELECTRIC ARC (Prof. Kristian Birkeland and Dr. Samuel Eyde werethe first to succeed commercially in making nitric acidfrom the nitrogen of the air. They used an electricarc, which, by means of a magnet, they spread out un-til it was bigger than a cart-wheel) THE CHEMIST AND THE FOOD PROBLEM 297 of nitrogen, and the rain has con-veyed it to the earth below. Millions,possibly billions, of such Storms inprimeval ages, helped to furnish theearth witlr the nitrogen that it nowyields to green leaves and forest ani-mals. One way of fixing nitrogen is toimitate nature. So, the scientists havedeveloped methods ot applying elec-tricity. How does the lightning flashreduce the nitrogen ? The laboratoryanswers. It is not the electricity thatovercomes the inertness of the gas,but the heat generated by the light-ning flash. Nitrogen must be is one way of fixing it. Butthe heat required is so intense, meas-ured as it is by thousands of
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