nitrogène

Daniel Rutherford, a Scottish physician, isolated nitrogen in 1772 by removing oxygen and carbon dioxide from air and observing that the residual gas could not support combustion or life. He called it 'noxious air.' Carl Wilhelm Scheele called it 'spent air.' Henry Cavendish called it 'mephitic air.' Nobody could agree on a name for a gas whose most notable quality was that it killed things by doing nothing — it was not poisonous, merely inert, suffocating by absence rather than presence.

Antoine Lavoisier proposed the name azote in 1787, from the Greek a- ('without') and zoe ('life') — 'the lifeless one.' Jean-Antoine Chaptal countered in 1790 with nitrogène, from the Greek nitron ('niter,' or potassium nitrate) and -genes ('forming'). Nitrogen was 'the niter-former,' the element essential to saltpeter, which was essential to gunpowder. Chaptal's name won in English, German, and most other languages. French, ironically, kept Lavoisier's azote.

Nitrogen is 78 percent of Earth's atmosphere — the most abundant gas in the air we breathe, yet biologically inaccessible to most organisms. Only certain bacteria can 'fix' atmospheric nitrogen into forms that plants can use, a process so important that the entire terrestrial food chain depends on it. In 1909, Fritz Haber developed a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, and Carl Bosch scaled it industrially. The Haber-Bosch process now feeds roughly half the world's population through nitrogen fertilizers — and also enabled the mass production of explosives.

Nitroglycerin, synthesized by Ascanio Sobrero in 1847, was so unstable that it killed workers who handled it. Alfred Nobel tamed it by mixing it with diatomaceous earth to create dynamite in 1867, then used his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes. The element Lavoisier called 'lifeless' turned out to sustain life on a planetary scale through fertilizer and to end it with equal efficiency through explosives. Nitrogen's etymology — niter-forming — was more prophetic than Chaptal could have known.