Turning Points in Catalysis

Abstract This personal journey through the enlarging landscape of heterogeneous catalysis, pure and applied, starts with the discovery in 1823 of a dramatic example of the synthesis of water that was to serve as the basis of the first commercial exploitation of catalysis, Dobereiners lighter (tinder box). The quickening pace of successive industrial innovations and of academic insight during the intervening 170 years are summarized and the turning points, both major and minor, identified. Although new concepts and new ideas emerged in relative profusion, few exhibited the longevity predicted for them at birth by their proponents. Some concepts, like broken milestones on a vanished road, have ceased to retain their significance. Some have survived, even flourished. But in catalysis, as in most other branches of natural science, new tools and new techniques, rather than new concepts, tend to hold sway. And just as experimental advances in enzymology and immunology have led to the design of remarkable new biocatalysts so also, but not yet at the same level of delicate control, have the tools and techniques of solid‐state chemistry (including novel preparative and computational procedures), generated many powerful rationally designed inorganic catalysts.