Nitrogen was isolated in 1772 by the Scottish physician Daniel Rutherford, who called it noxious or mephitic air because it neither supported life nor combustion; Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Henry Cavendish reached it independently. The modern name was coined by Jean-Antoine Chaptal in 1790 as nitrogene, meaning niter-former, from niter, the old name for saltpetre (potassium nitrate).
Antoine Lavoisier preferred azote, from the Greek for lifeless, a name that survives in French and in words like azide. Nitrogen makes up about seventy-eight per cent of the atmosphere yet is chemically aloof. Cooled to a liquid it makes a cheap and widely used refrigerant, while its compounds, from ammonia and nitrate fertilisers to explosives, rank among the most important of industrial chemicals; nitrogen is also a building block of every protein and strand of DNA. The industrial capture of atmospheric nitrogen transformed human history: the Haber-Bosch process, developed by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch between 1909 and 1913, fixes nitrogen from the air into ammonia for fertiliser, a feat sometimes called making bread from air, and it is credited with sustaining a large share of the world's population growth since. The same chemistry that feeds billions also underlies high explosives, since nitrate compounds are the active ingredient of gunpowder, dynamite and TNT alike, so nitrogen's industrial harnessing carries both a Nobel Prize for Haber and a lasting association with the machinery of war.