40 Fun Facts About Ammonia

Ammonia takes its name from which ancient god, near whose desert temple a namesake salt was once gathered?

Amun was Ammon to the Greeks, and the Roman writer Pliny described a salt named for a nearby temple of his in North Africa; the name later passed to the gas.

The pale upper clouds of which planet are made of frozen ammonia crystals floating above deeper layers?

Jupiter's bright zones owe their lighter colour to the frozen ammonia, while nobody is yet sure what stains the darker belts that run between them.

Ancient Roman launderers cleaned cloth by treading it in tubs of which stale, ammonia-rich liquid?

Urine mattered so much to Rome's cloth trade that it was taxed, because once it goes stale it becomes a cleansing source of ammonium salts.

Safety labels warn never to mix ammonia with which common household cleaner, because the pair release toxic fumes?

Bleach contains hypochlorite, which reacts with ammonia to form irritating chloramine gases and can go on to make an explosive compound, nitrogen trichloride.

Which ammonia-releasing remedy, once used to revive fainting Victorians, do athletes now reach for before competing?

Smelling salts give off ammonia gas that triggers a sharp reflex breath, and most boxing competitions now ban them for fear of masking a serious injury.

Which candy, hugely popular in Finland and the Netherlands, gets its sharp salty bite from ammonium chloride?

Licorice flavoured with the salt is known as salmiak, and the Nordic taste for it stretches to salmiak chocolate, chewing gum and vodka.

Which human organ protects the brain by turning toxic ammonia from protein breakdown into far safer urea?

Liver cells run the urea cycle, and when the organ fails, as in cirrhosis, ammonia builds up in the blood and can bring on confusion and coma.

A warehouse of ammonium nitrate exploded in August 2020 at the port of which Mediterranean capital city?

Beirut's blast involved about 2,750 tonnes of the chemical, which had sat in a port warehouse for six years after being unloaded from an abandoned cargo ship.

Hákarl, an Icelandic delicacy notorious for its powerful ammonia smell, is the fermented meat of which animal?

Shark meat from the Greenland species is poisonous when fresh because it is loaded with urea, so it is fermented and then hung to dry for four to five months.

Roughly 70 percent of the ammonia made in factories worldwide goes into which kind of product?

Fertilizer from factory ammonia transformed twentieth-century farming, and pure ammonia is even injected straight into the soil of crop fields.

Which German chemist won a Nobel Prize for making ammonia from air yet also led Germany's poison gas programme?

Fritz Haber's synthesis has been called the detonator of the population explosion, yet he was on hand in person for the first chlorine gas attack at Ypres in 1915.

Each ammonia molecule is one nitrogen atom joined to three atoms of which element, found twice in every water molecule?

Hydrogen gives ammonia the formula NH3, and its three atoms sit beneath the nitrogen like the legs of a tripod rather than lying flat.

Which animals turn waste ammonia into a pasty uric acid, the pale part of their droppings, to save water?

Birds share the trick with reptiles: uric acid is a solid, so it leaves the body with minimal water, whereas mammals must flush out urea dissolved in liquid.

Bacteria in the root nodules of which plant family, including peas and clover, turn nitrogen from the air into ammonia?

Legumes shelter rhizobia bacteria, whose nitrogenase enzymes manage at soil temperature what chemical plants need fierce heat and pressure to achieve.

Ammonia dissolved in water, the pungent cleaner sold in bottles, belongs to which chemical category?

Weak base fits because the molecule's lone pair of electrons accepts a proton from water, yet a strong solution still reaches a pH above 11.

Ammonia gas turns damp red litmus paper which colour, a classic test used in school chemistry labs?

Blue is the tell-tale result, and the dye that makes the paper change is a mixture extracted from lichens.

Arts and Crafts furniture makers such as Gustav Stickley darkened which wood by sealing it in ammonia fumes?

Oak darkens because ammonia reacts with its natural tannins, an effect first noticed in England when boards stored in a stable changed colour.

Lean beef trimmings treated with ammonia to kill bacteria became notorious under which nickname after 2012 news reports?

Pink slime made with ammonia gas is banned for human consumption in Canada, although American regulators judged the treatment both safe and effective.

Which rocket plane, flown by Neil Armstrong before his astronaut days, burned liquid ammonia as its fuel?

X-15 engineers valued ammonia because it left no soot in the reusable engine, and the aircraft went on to cross the edge of outer space.

Medieval alchemists in the Islamic world collected ammonium chloride from the soot of which animal's burning dung?

Camel dung soot gave the Islamic world a home-grown supply of the salt, called sal ammoniac, alongside the older sources in Central Asia.

On the International Space Station, liquid ammonia circulating in loops outside the hull does which job?

Cooling is ammonia's task in orbit: the loops carry heat from the electronics to large radiators, and the fluid is kept under enough pressure to stay liquid.

Ferdinand Carré's ammonia-based machine, shown at London's 1862 exhibition, was built to produce what?

Ice from Carré's absorption machine launched ammonia's long career in refrigeration, and in 1876 he fitted out a ship to carry frozen meat between continents.

Which ultra-precise timekeeper was first prototyped in 1949 using the natural vibration of ammonia molecules?

Atomic clock builders soon switched from ammonia to caesium, the atom whose vibrations now define the length of the second.

Which microwave forerunner of the laser was first built in the 1950s using a stream of energised ammonia molecules?

Maser is short for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, and the invention earned Charles Townes a share of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Which eighteenth-century chemist, famed for his work on oxygen, isolated ammonia gas and named it alkaline air?

Priestley collected the gas in the 1770s as one of several new airs, and the French chemist Claude Berthollet worked out its exact composition in 1785.

Ammonia solution was once called spirit of hartshorn because it was distilled from the horn shavings of which animal?

Deer antlers, hartshorn in older English, were shaved and distilled for the purpose, and a jelly made from them was once prescribed for diarrhoea.

The fossil ammonite and the chemical ammonia are both named after a god shown with the horns of which animal?

Ram horns curl in a tight spiral much like the fossil shells, which is why the Roman writer Pliny the Elder named the fossils after the god's horns.

America's deadliest industrial accident hit which Gulf Coast port in 1947 when a ship's ammonium nitrate cargo exploded?

Texas City lost at least 581 people, including all but one member of its volunteer fire department, after a fire broke out aboard the French ship Grandcamp.

What does the chemical term anhydrous mean in anhydrous ammonia, the form that farmers inject into their fields?

Without water is the meaning: the label separates the pure gas, stored as a pressurised liquid, from household ammonia, which is only a 5 to 10 percent solution.

Which BASF engineer scaled ammonia synthesis up to factory size and won the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

Carl Bosch had to design furnaces and compressors that could survive extreme gas pressures, and the first full-scale plant rose at Oppau in Germany.

Which metal has catalysed the industrial synthesis of ammonia since it replaced scarce osmium in 1909?

Iron-based catalysts were found by BASF researcher Alwin Mittasch and are still in use, sparing industry both osmium and the uranium once tried in its place.

Synthetic ammonia let Germany keep making explosives in World War I after a blockade cut off nitrate from which country?

Chile's saltpetre deposits were controlled by British companies and the Allies ruled the sea lanes, so Germany made its nitrate from ammonia instead.

Which British progressive rock band released the 1984 album Ammonia Avenue, home to the hit Don't Answer Me?

The Alan Parsons Project took the title from a street sign at an ICI chemical works in Billingham, England, seen amid miles of pipes with no people or trees.

On icy worlds such as Pluto, ammonia mixed into water may keep buried oceans liquid by acting as a natural what?

Antifreeze is the role: a mixture of water and ammonia can stay liquid down to about minus 100 degrees Celsius, cold enough to keep such bodies geologically active.

In 1968 ammonia became the first molecule of more than two atoms ever detected in which location?

Interstellar space gave up the find through microwave signals from the direction of the galactic core, and astronomers now use ammonia as a thermometer for gas clouds.

In permanent hair dye, ammonia opens up which outer layer of each strand so that colour can reach the core?

Cuticle opening lets the developer and colour reach the cortex, which is why ammonia-free dyes are gentler on hair but lighten it less.

Which stomach bacterium, a leading cause of ulcers, shields itself from acid by making its own ammonia?

Helicobacter pylori makes large amounts of urease, an enzyme that splits the urea in the stomach into ammonia and so creates a neutral pocket around the cell.

During World War II fuel shortages, ammonia was used to power buses in which occupied European country?

Belgium's wartime buses were not the first of their kind: ammonia engines had already been tried on a New Orleans streetcar line in the 1870s and 1880s.

Baker's ammonia, still used in crisp Scandinavian cookies, was largely replaced in home kitchens by what?

Baking powder took over because baker's ammonia gives off a pungent gas that only escapes fully from thin, dry bakes such as crackers.

The Solvay process uses ammonia, brine and limestone to make which chemical, vital to the glass industry?

Soda ash is the product, and the method succeeded commercially because the ammonia is recovered and recycled rather than used up.