Catalysts

I came across a claim on Quora that Epicatalysis is really wonderful, so I go look it up on Wikipedia, but the explanation is totally opaque. I eventually found a decent explanation here. To get some background I start reading about catalysts and I dug up this stuff, all from Wikipedia. Turns out it doesn't help explain epicatalysis at all, but it does make some interesting reading.

Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934)
1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Fritz Haber was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize for his invention of a method to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.

Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. Second Battle of Ypres (World War I) was the first mass use by Germany of poison gas on the Western Front.

Haber actively recruited physicists, chemists, and other scientists to the gas warfare unit. Future Nobel laureates

• James Franck, 
• Gustav Hertz, and 
• Otto Hahn 

served as gas troops in Haber's unit.

In his studies of the effects of poison gas, Haber noted that exposure to a low concentration of a poisonous gas for a long time often had the same effect (death) as exposure to a high concentration for a short time. He formulated a simple mathematical relationship between the gas concentration and the necessary exposure time. This relationship became known as Haber's rule.

During the 1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the cyanide gas formulation Zyklon A, a predecessor to Zyklon B, the brand name of a German gas pesticide that was used during the Holocaust.

Carl Bosch (27 August 1874 – 26 April 1940)
1931 Nobel prize in Chemistry

Carl Bosch, nephew of spark plug man Robert Bosch, was a German chemist and engineer. He was a pioneer in the field of high-pressure industrial chemistry and founder of IG Farben, at one point the world's largest chemical company.

From 1909 until 1913 he transformed Fritz Haber's tabletop demonstration of a method to fix nitrogen using high pressure chemistry into an important industrial process to produce megatons of fertilizer and explosives. The fully developed system is called the Haber–Bosch process. His contribution was to make this process work on a large industrial scale. To do this he:

• discovered a practical catalyst
• designed large compressors and safe high-pressure furnaces
• developed a means to provide pure hydrogen gas in quantity as the feedstock
• developed a cheap and safe means to clean and process the product ammonia

The first full-scale Haber-Bosch plant was erected in Oppau, Germany (now part of Ludwigshafen). The process enabled the economical synthesis of large amounts of ammonia which fueled a revolution in industry and agriculture. This large scale production of ammonia led to increased agricultural yields throughout the world.

Irving Langmuir (January 31, 1881 – August 16, 1957)
1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Irving Langmuir was an American chemist and physicist. His most famous publication is the 1919 article The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules in which he outlined his concentric theory of atomic structure. While at General Electric from 1909 to 1950, Langmuir

• advanced several fields of physics and chemistry
• invented the gas-filled incandescent lamp (Edison's bulb was evacuated)
• invented the hydrogen welding technique
• won the Nobel Prize for his work in surface chemistry

The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research near Socorro, New Mexico, was named in his honor, as was the American Chemical Society journal for surface science called Langmuir.

Gerhard Ertl (born 10 October 1936)
2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Gerhard Ertl is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin, Germany. Ertl’s research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry. His detailed explanations of  the molecular mechanisms involved have helped explain how fuel cells and catalytic converters work and why iron rusts.