A Brief History of Catalysis

The basic idea of catalysis can be traced to the writings of J. J. Berzelius/ who in 1836 reviewed a number of curious occurrences in which traces of certain substances seemed to have an effect on chemical reactions disproportionate to then-amounts. In a passage often quoted, but bearing repetition, he wrote/-  

I shall therefore call it the catal5 tic power of substances, and the decomposition by means of this power catalysis, just as we use the word analysis to denote the separation of the component parts of bodies by means of ordinary chemical forces. Catalytic power actually means that the substance is able to awake affinities which are asleep at this temperature by their mere presence and not by their own affinity. 

We should not mock this first attempt to impart scientific rigour to such an elusive concept, but rather seek to place it in its historical context, remembering how rudimentary were chemical ideas at that time the metaphor of awaking sleeping affinities is one which sticks in the memory. 

In a time when chemical observations were unsystematically hoarded, Berzelius coined the term catalysis [1-4] in an effort to make order from the chaos. For him, catalysts 

Understanding Organometallic Reaction Mechanisms and Catalysis Computational and Experimental Tools, Rrst Edition. Edited by Valentine P. Ananikov. 

This new term was not appreciated by all his peers. Liebig expressed at that time that the creation of a new force by a new word explains nothing [4]. Maybe Liebig was right on the fact that adding labels on observations does not explain anything, but the label stuck nonetheless. As we shall see, a proper definition and use of catalytic terms is not only a whim of pedant chemists, but a mean to generate proper conclusions from proper experimental observations. 

Berzelius in his definition implied that catalysis was a type of force generated by the catalyst on the reactants [3,4, 6, 7], an idea rooted in the condensation theory of reactions over metals from Faraday [4] (who had a fondness for rationalizing observations with forces and fields). Nowadays, there is a consensus that catalysis is a pure chemical effect, where the catalyst must act generating an alternative reaction pathway [2, 6 -11]. The physical effects with the potential to accelerate reactions by changing forces and fields (such as tinkering with the solvent dielectric constant [8]) are sometimes demoted and not considered catalytical [6, 

The current lUPAC s definition of a catalyst [13], which is similar to the classical definitions of Ostwald [2,4, 6, 8, 9], is 

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