Last week Daedalus was devising crystalline combustion catalysts with highly regular surfaces. Their product molecules were not disengaged randomly as hot gas; instead, they sprang off the ordered surface in a specific direction, carrying with them much of the energy of the reaction. Their ejection imposed a forceful directional recoil on the surface.

Thus chemical energy could be converted to mechanical energy without going through the intermediate stage of heat. Daedalus was planning aircraft, gas turbines, and so on, driven directly by reaction forces from their combustion catalyst surfaces. He now wants to generate electricity this way.

Many reacting catalytic surfaces disengage electrons; at least one (the oxidation of ethylene on a silver catalyst) does so for a form of hydrocarbon combustion. This must be a chemoelectric effect, analogous to the well-known photoelectric effect. The energy of the chemical reaction happens to be equal to the work function needed to eject an electron from the surface — so the energy is resonantly transferred to the departing electron. If the electron, coming from an ordered reaction on a regular surface, is ejected in a specific direction, the result is an electric current.

So DREADCO chemists are performing a range of hydrocarbon oxidations on regular surfaces, seeking the most copious and most ordered chemoelectric emitters. Their goal is a surface on which gas and air impinge, and from which a stream of electrons emerges. Fortunately, electrons lose little energy in interactions with gas molecules; even so, the collecting electrode must be very close to the catalyst surface — perhaps formed on it by microelectronic fabrication methods. The external circuit will return to the catalyst as a counter-electrode. Ideally, the system will burn not ethylene but butane, already used in many small catalytic-combustion devices.

DREADCO's Catabat will be almost the ultimate simple fuel cell. With no moving parts or complicated chemistry, it will take in fuel and air, and burn them to electricity. If efficient enough, it will not even get very hot. The Catabat will replace batteries, small generators, and socket power everywhere. Mobile phones will chatter longer, laptop computers will no longer fade just as the crucial file is being completed, and the global pile of discarded batteries will be replaced by a much smaller one of empty butane canisters.