Dobereiner’s lamp

The special economic role of metal and oxide surfaces in heterogeneous catalysis has provided a lot of the driving force behind current surface chemistry and physics. We always knew that the chemistry took place at the surface. But it is only today that we are discovering the basic mechanistic steps in heterogeneous catalysis. It s an exciting time how wonderful to learn precisely how Dobereiner s lamp and the Haber process work ... 

Andrew Fyfe (Edinburgh i8 January 1792-31 December 1861), M.D. 1814, F.R.S. 1823, lecturer in chemistry in Edinburgh, professor of medicine and chemistry in Aberdeen (1844-61), analysed the water of the North Polar Sea and made experiments on the occurrence of iodine in sponges, kelp, etc. , on coal gas and oil gas, and a form of Dobereiner s lamp, and on silver phosphate as sensitive material in photography. He analysed a specimen of tutenag or white copper of China , and this led to the European development of the white alloy. 

Dobereiner s best-known discovery was the kindling of a jet of hydrogen impinging in air on spongy platinum, on the basis of which he devised the Dobereiner lamp . Dobereiner showed that hydrogen becomes odourless when passed over moist charcoal. He discovered the catalytic action of manganese dioxide in the decomposition of potassium chlorate by heat and explained it as the action of a porous body. He introduced the name metalytic action for the catalytic action of platinum. 

---