The man who would go down in history as the father of chemical warfare acted as his own guinea pig to test his invention. On April 2, 1915, Fritz Haber, the head of Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry, rode through a yellow-green cloud of chlorine gas on grounds used for troop exercises.
The experiment was successful. The scientist, himself a war enthusiast, began coughing convulsively; he grew pale and had to be carried away on a stretcher.
About three weeks later, German troops used chlorine gas for the first time on a mass scale during combat on the Western Front near the Flemish city of Ypres in Belgium, deploying a total of 150 tons of the substance. At first, French soldiers thought the shimmering cloud was intended as a diversionary tactic. But then, suddenly, they began flailing about with their hands in the air as they gasped for breath and collapsed on the ground. As many as 1,200 were killed and 3,000 wounded. Haber observed the event from a safe distance.
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