In the twentieth century Dennis Albert Dowden, affectionately referred to as DAD by friends and colleagues, was an important figure in the development of an understanding of the structure of industrial heterogeneous catalysts, the species present and the processes taking place on them. He was born in Bristol, UK, and following education at the University of Bristol and a short period at Amherst College in the USA, in 1938 he joined Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) at Billingham in the North East of England. He worked there on catalysis, catalyst manufacture and catalytic processes for the next thirty-seven years. His major contribution was to bring a wide range of sciences and a rational approach into what had been until then regarded as “black art”, capable of only empirical analysis. His influence extended across ICI, which at that time operated many industrial catalytic processes, and academically he was influential worldwide and especially in the USA.

In the century since the first platinum gauze for nitric acid production was made by Johnson Matthey, the demand for nitric acid has increased considerably with its vast number of applications: from fertiliser production to mining explosives and gold extraction. Throughout the significant changes in the industry over the past 100 years, there has been continual development in Johnson Matthey’s gauze technology to meet the changing needs of customers: improving efficiency, increasing campaign length, reducing metal losses and reducing harmful nitrous oxide emissions. This article reviews the progress in gauze development over the past century and looks at recent developments.

Global methanol production in 2016 was around 85 million metric tonnes (1), enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every twelve minutes. And if all the global production capacity were in full use, it would only take eight minutes. The vast majority of the produced methanol undergoes at least one further chemical transformation, more likely two or three before being turned into a final product. Methanol is one of the first building blocks in a wide variety of synthetic materials that make up many modern products and is also used as a fuel and a fuel additive. This paper looks at the last 100 years or so of the industrial history of methanol production.

This paper reviews the use and relation of the word ‘ptène’ to osmium. While Smithson Tennant discovered osmium in platinum ore in 1804, the French chemists Antoine-François Fourcroy and Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin simultaneously identified in a platinum residue a metal they called ‘ptène’. This name was most probably attributed to a mixture of platinoids (excluding platinum), mainly osmium and iridium. Nevertheless, Fourcroy later considered that ‘ptène’ was the name they attributed to osmium.