Nickel Comes Full Cycle

摘要

Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have resulted from what at first seemed to be failed experiments; famous examples include Fleming's discovery of penicillin or Penzias's and Wilson's discovery of the cosmic background radiation. The modern era of polyolefin chemistry, which has helped to make plastics an important presence in our everyday lives, also has its origins in such an experiment. In 1953, Erhard Holzkamp, a doctoral student working under Karl Ziegler at the Max-Planck-Institute for Coal Research in Mulheim, Germany, was struggling to reproduce a reaction discovered in Ziegler's lab a few years earlier. In this so-called "Aufbau" reaction, a molecule of ethylene is inserted into the carbon-metal bonds of triethylaluminum. Careful investigation revealed that nickel impurities, which were introduced by cleaning the stainless steel reaction vessel with acid, were inhibiting the Aufbau reaction in Holzkamp's experiments, a phenomenon that came to be known as the "nickel effect".