The Catalyst Club: Contentious Chemistry and Confounding Innovation

“Catalysis is not a science, it is a phenomenon.”

—Paul Weisz (1959)¹

“One of the most striking characteristics of contact catalysis is that it is as yet subject to no known principles. . . . Since we do not know the laws which govern catalytic action, it is quite like looking for a needle in a haystack without even a good magnet to act as a guide.”

— Alfred T. Larson (1923)²

“Had one said, fifty years ago, the biological protein synthesis would by 1968 be better understood than the Haber-Bosch catalytic ammonia synthesis, one would have been thought to be wrong in the head. . . . For protein synthesis is unified . . . by describable processes, while catalysis lacks such a central maypole round which all can sing and dance.”

— D. S. Davies (1968)³

In 1949 a group of seven scientists and engineers, most of them associated with the local oil-refining industry, met to form the Catalyst Club of Philadelphia. Although catalysis by this time was a central technology in the burgeoning petrochemical industry (most gasoline, chemicals, and plastics are made by processes that employ catalysts), the community of catalyst researchers had not organized under the auspices of either the American Chemical Society or the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The use of the term “club” is curious; perhaps it was intended to be as much a social organization as a technical one. Clearly, the founders saw themselves as practitioners of something that was distinct from either chemistry or chemical engineering. That the new Catalyst Club met an unfulfilled need was reflected in increasing attendance at its monthly meetings, which soon grew to a hundred.⁴ In 1965 the seven Catalyst clubs combined to form the Catalysis Society of North America, with nearly a thousand members. Its first annual meeting would feature “an educational program . . . which will provide an opportunity for many of our scientific brethren to become familiar with the basics, and mysteries of catalytic phenomenon.”⁵

That a modern technical community was using the word “mysteries” in the mid-1960s attests to the long-standing challenge to researchers to reduce the overwhelming complexity of catalytic phenomena. As late as 1983 Science published an article titled “Catalysis: ‘No Longer a Black Art.’”⁶ The “black art” designation was a symbol of both pride and embarrassment for the catalyst community. The pride was associated with the esoteric nature of their craft; catalysis could be an entirely new discipline, not just an interdisciplinary mix of chemistry and physics.⁷ On the other hand, for decades, scientists had attempted—and failed—to develop a comprehensive theory of catalysis. When the first journal devoted to catalysis, Advances in Catalysis, was published in 1948, the editors noted that “a science of catalysis has to be erected on foundations that have yet to be laid.”⁸ This failure to develop powerful theoretical concepts made it impossible to make useful predictions of the potential catalytic properties of materials based on their composition and structure. New catalysts continued to be discovered by extensive and expensive experimentation. Catalyst research was a very difficult enterprise requiring interdisciplinary knowledge, innovative experimental expertise, and a powerful analytical mind. For those who had developed these traits, the payoffs could be fantastic; the perfect catalyst could make recalcitrant molecules react with one another very rapidly, under very mild conditions, and produce no by-products. The history of catalysis is replete with dramatic discoveries that astounded even the catalyst community; these included the innovative catalysts that spurred the growth of the petrochemical industry in the years after World War II.⁹

This article traces the transition of catalysis from the domain of a small number of industrial technologists—the original informal catalyst club—before World War II to an organized technological and scientific specialty during the postwar era.¹⁰ Despite the discovery of several crucially important catalysts during the period and the growth in scale of academic chemistry and chemical engineering research, the catalyst community struggled to define its boundaries and determine its research agenda.¹¹ This process turned out to be a long and contentious one, which...