Dr. Rochow remembered the work of Dr. Alfred Stock, in Germany. 2H 2 Suppose he reacted silicon with methyl chloride, CH 3 Cl. Successful chemists must be observant. Well, Rochow went to the laboratory and treated silicon with CH 3 Cl. The experiment was disappointing at first.
Successful chemists tend to work long hours.
He planned to pass a stream of methyl chloride gas along with some hydrogen chloride across a bed of silicon at high temperature. But this morning he set up using a source of silicon that contained copper metal. He heated a tube containing the Cu-Si to 370 degrees Celsius and ran the gases over the hot silicon all day. But Rochow did not go home. It turns out, the hydrogen chloride gas served only to etch the surface of the Cu-Si that day.