We would, instead, take it for granted that had we ob served the man in detail all day, we would have caught him transferring the bricks from the heap to the wall one at a time. And what's not magic for the bricklayer is not magic for the saltpeter, either.

With the birth and progress of the nineteenth century, more examples of this sort of thing were discovered. In 1812, for instance, the Russian chemist Gottlieb Sigis mund Kirchhoff…

And here I break off and begin a longish digression for no other reason than that I want to; relying, as I always do, on the infinite patience and good humor of the Gentle Readers.

It may strike you that in saying "the Russian chemist, Gottlieb Sig7ismund Kirchhoff" I have made a humorous error. Surely no one with a name like Gottlieb Sigismund Kirchhoff can be a Russian! It depends, however, on whether you mean a Russian in an ethnic or in a geographic sense.

To explain what I mean, let's go back to the beginning of the thirteenth century. At that time, the regions of our land and Livonia, along the southeastern shores of the Baltic Sea (the modem Latvia and Estonia) were in habited by virtually the last group of pagans in Europe. It was the time of the Crusades, and the Germans to the southeast felt it a pious duty to slaughter the poorly armed and disorganized pagans for the sake of their souls.

The crusading Germans were of the "Order of the Knights of the Sword" (better known by the shorter and more popular name of "Livonian Knights"). They were joined in 1237 by the Teutonic Knights, who had first established themselves in the Holy Land. By the end of the thirteenth century the Baltic shores had been conquered, with the German expeditionary forces in control.

The Teutonic Knights, as a political organization, did not maintain control for more than a couple of centuries.

They were defeated by the Poles in the 1460s. The Swedes, under Gustavus Adolphus, took over in the 1620s, and in the 1720s the Russians, under Peter the Great, replaced the Swedes.

Nevertheless, however the political tides might shift and whatever flag flew and to whatever monarch the loyal in habitants might drink toasts, the land itself continued to belong to the "Baltic barons" (or "Balts") who were the German-speaking descendants of the Teutonic Knights.

Peter the Great was an aggressive Westernizer who built a new capital, St. Petersburg* at the very edge of the Livonian area, and the Balts were a valued group of sub jects indeed.

This remained true all through the eighteenth and nine teenth centuries when the Balts possessed an influence within the Russian Empire out of all proportion to their numbers. Their influence in Russian science was even more lopsided.

The trouble was that public education within Russia lagged far behind its status in western Europe. The Tsars saw no reason to encourage public education and make trouble for themselves. No doubt they felt instinctively that The city was named for his name-saint and not for himself.

Whatever Tsar Peter was, a saint he was not a corrupt and stupid government is only really safe with an uneducated populace.

This meant that even elite Russians who wanted a secular education had to go abroad, especially if they wanted a graduate education in science. Going abroad was not easy, either, for it meant leaming a new language and new ways. What's more, the Russian Orthodox Church viewed all Westerners as heretics and little better than heathens. Contact with heathen ways (such as science) was at best dangerous and at worst damnation. Consequently, for a Russian to travel West for an education meant the overcoming of religious scruples as well.

The Balts, however, were German in culture and Lu theran in religion and had none of these inhibitions. They shared, with the Germans of Germany itself, in the,height ening level of education-in particular, of scientific educa tion-through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

So it follows that among the great Russian scientists of the nineteenth century we not only have a man with a name like Gottlieb Sigismund Kirchhoff, but also others with names like Friedrich Konrad Beilstein, Karl Ernst von Baer, and Wilhelm Ostwald.

This is not to say that there weren't Russian scientists in this period with Russian names. Examples are Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov, Aleksandr Onufrievich Kovalev ski, and Dmitri Ivanovich Mendel6ev.

However, Russian officialdom actually preferred the Balts (who supported the Tsarist government under which they flourished) to the Russian intelligentsia itself (which frequently made trouble and had vague notions of reform).

In addition, the Germans were the nineteenth-century scientists par excellence, and to speak Russian with a German accent probably leiit distinction to a scientist.

(And before you sneer at this point of view, just think of the American stereotype of a rocket scientist. He has a thick German accent, nicht wahr?-And this despite the fact that the first rocketman, and the one whose experi ments started the Germans on the proper track [Robert Goddard], spoke with a New England twang.)

So it happened that the Imperial Academy of Sciences of the Russian Empire (the most prestigious scientific organization in the land) was divided into a "German party" and a "Russian party," with the former dominant.

In 1880 there was a vacancy in the chair of chemical technology at the Academy, and two names were proposed.

The German party proposed Beilstein, and the Russian party proposed Mende]6ev. There was no comparison really. Beilstein spent years of his life preparing an encyclo pedia of the properties and methods of preparation of many thousands of organic compounds which, with nu merous supplements and additions, is still a chemical bible.

This is a colossal monument to his thorough, hard-work ing competence-but' it is no more. Mendel6ev, who worked out the periodic table of the elements, was, on the other hand, a chemist of the first magnitude-an un doubted genius in the field.

Nevertheless, government officials threw,their weight be bind Beilstein, who was elected by a vote of ten to nine.

It is no wonder, then, that in recent years, when the Russians have finally won a respected place in the scientific sun, they tend to overdo things a bit. They've got a great deal of humiliation to make up for.

That ends the digression, so I'll start over As the nineteenth century wore on, more examples of baste-making were discovered. In 1812, for instance, the Russian chemist Gottlieb Sigismund Kirchhoff found that if he boiled starch in water to which a small amount of sulfuric acid had been added, the starch broke down to a simple form of sugar, one that is now called glucose. This would not happen in the absence of acid. When it did happen in the presence of acid, that acid was not consumed but was still present at the end.

Then, in 1816, the English chemist Humphry Davy found that certain organic vapors, such as those of alcohol, combined with oxygen more easily in the presence of metals such as platinum. Hydrogen combined more easily with oxygen in the presence of platinum also.

Fun and games with platinum started at once. In 1823 a German chemist, Johann Wolfgang Debereiner, set up a hydrogen generator which, on turning an appropriate stop cock, would allow a jet of hydrogen to shoot out against a strip of platinum foil. The hydrogen promptly burst into flame and "Dbbereiner's lamp" was therefore the first cigarette lighter. Unfortunately, impurities in the hydrogen gas quickly "poisoned" the expensive bit of platinum and rendered it useless.

In 1831 an English chemist, Peregrine Phillips, reasoned that if platinum could bring about the combination of hydrogen and of alcohol with oxygen, why should it not do the same for sulfur dioxide? Phillips found it would and patented the process. It was not for years afterward, how ever, that methods were discovered for delaying the poisoning of the metal, and it was only after that that a platinum catalyst could be profitably used in sulfuric acid manufacture to replace Ward's saltpeter.

In 1836 such phenomena were brought to the attention of the Swedish chemist J6ns Jakob Berzelius who, during the first half of the nineteenth century, was the uncrowned king of chemistry. It was he who suggested the words "catalyst" and "catalysis" from Greek words meaning "to break down" or "to decompose." Berzelius had in mind such examples of catalytic action as the decomposition of the large starch molecule into smaller sugar molecules by the action of acid.

But platinum introduced a new glamor to the concept of catalysis. For one thing, it was a rare and precious metal. For another, it enabled people to begin suspecting magic again.

Can platinum be expected to behave as a middleman as saltpeter does?

At first blush, the answer to that would seem to be in the negative. Of all substances, platinum is one of the most inert. It doesn't combine with oxygen or hydrogen under any normal circumstances. How, then, can it cause the two to combine?

If our metaphorical catalyst is a bricklayer, then plati num can only be a bricklayer tightly bound in a strait jacket.

Well, then, are we reduced to magic? To molecular action at a distance?

Chemists searched for something more prosaic. The suspicion grew during the nineteenth century that the inert ness of platinum is, in one sense at least, an illusion. In the body of the metal, platinum atoms are attached to each other in all directions and are satisfied to remain so. In bulk, then, platinum will not react with oxygen or hydro gen (or most other chemicals, either).

On the surface of the platinum, however, atoms on the metal boundary and immediately adjacent to the air have no other platinum atoms, in the air-direction at least, to attach themselves to. Instead, then, they attach themselves to whatever atoms or molecules they find handy oxygen atoms, for instance. This forms a thin film over the surface, a film one molecule thick. It is completely invisible, of course, and all we see is a smooth, shiny, platinum sur face, which seems completely nonreactive and inert.

As parts of a surface film, cixygen and hydrogen react more readily than they do when making up bulk gas.

Suppose, then, that when a water molecule is formed by the combination of hydrogen and oxygen on the platinum surface, it is held more weakly than an oxygen molecule would be. The moment an oxygen molecule struck that portion of the surface it would replace the water molecule in the film. Now there would be the chance for the forma tion of another water molecule, and so on.