NN   +   HH + HH + HH —­> NHHH + NHHH
Nitrogen  hydrogen         ammonia

The animals go in two by two, but they come out four by four.  Four molecules of the mixed elements are turned into two molecules and so the gas shrinks to half its volume.  At the same time it acquires an odor—­familiar to us when we are curing a cold—­that neither of the original gases had.  The agent that effects the transformation in this case is not the electric spark—­for this would tend to work the reaction backwards—­but uranium, a rare metal, which has the peculiar property of helping along a reaction while seeming to take no part in it.  Such a substance is called a catalyst.  The action of a catalyst is rather mysterious and whenever we have a mystery we need an analogy.  We may, then, compare the catalyst to what is known as “a good mixer” in society.  You know the sort of man I mean.  He may not be brilliant or especially talkative, but somehow there is always “something doing” at a picnic or house-party when he is along.  The tactful hostess, the salon leader, is a social catalyst.  The trouble with catalysts, either human or metallic, is that they are rare and that sometimes they get sulky and won’t work if the ingredients they are supposed to mix are unsuitable.

But the uranium, osmium, platinum or whatever metal is used as a catalyzing agent is expensive and although it is not used up it is easily “poisoned,” as the chemists say, by impurities in the gases.  The nitrogen and the hydrogen for the Haber process must then be prepared and purified before trying to combine them into ammonia.  The nitrogen is obtained by liquefying air by cold and pressure and then boiling off the nitrogen at 194 deg.  C. The oxygen left is useful for other purposes.  The hydrogen needed is extracted by a similar process of fractional distillation from “water-gas,” the blue-flame burning gas used for heating.  Then the nitrogen and hydrogen, mixed in the proportion of one to three, as shown in the reaction given above, are compressed to two hundred atmospheres, heated to 1300 deg.  F. and passed over the finely divided uranium.  The stream of gas that comes out contains about four per cent. of ammonia, which is condensed to a liquid by cooling and the uncombined hydrogen and nitrogen passed again through the apparatus.

The ammonia can be employed in refrigeration and other ways but if it is desired to get the nitrogen into the form of nitric acid it has to be oxidized by the so-called Ostwald process.  This is the reaction: 

NH_{3}  +  4O   —­>   HNO_{3} + H_{2}O
ammonia  oxygen    nitric acid  water

The catalyst used to effect this combination is the metal platinum in the form of fine wire gauze, since the action takes place only on the surface.  The ammonia gas is mixed with air which supplies the oxygen and the heated mixture run through the platinum gauze at the rate of several yards a second.  Although the gases come in contact with the platinum only a five-hundredth part of a second yet eighty-five per cent. is converted into nitric acid.