Yet the change they catalysed looks, in retrospect, inexorable.
A 55-minute spell without losing a wicket suggested sterner resistance on the third morning than they had shown on day two, yet the loss of Shivnarine Chanderpaul catalysed their demise.
That is what catalysed my journey into working on gender equality.
Baumgartner is not one of those elegant affluent men who catalysed an art movement.
A tax-transparency revolution is under way, catalysed by America's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010.
Gang violence, catalysed by drug trafficking, and weak law enforcement have given Honduras the highest murder rate in the world.
The Philippines has won praise for its "PEZA" zones, which offer a streamlined permit process for foreign investors, says Shang-Jin Wei of the Asian Development Bank.Most economists agree that SEZs catalysed liberalisation in China, which used them to test reforms that were seen as too hard to unveil nationwide.
Since an awful lot of industrial chemistry is catalysed this way, and the chemical industry lies, one way or another, at the base of most manufacturing, there is a good argument that this is the most important prize of the lot.
In the end, his decision to cancel catalysed a tea-party reaction that killed rail projects in Florida and elsewhere.Mr Christie is now back in those funding negotiations with the Port Authority and the federal government anyway, because New Jersey needs to agree on a funding formula for the Amtrak Gateway Tunnel, which is expected to replace ARC.
James Ferris of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in New York state, explained to the meeting that his research on a type of clay called montmorillonite showed that it catalysed the formation of RNA molecules up to 50 units long.
Mr Brandenburg released the software that enabled PC users to digitise their CDs for free, a move that Mr Witt believes "catalysed a golden age of copyright infringement that decimated the music industry" and made him extremely rich.
