 Rayner-Canham considers her most important contribution to chemistry to be the discovery that metals could be processed through aqueous chemical reduction at room temperature, as an alternative to smelting at high temperatures.Her theoretical work on catalysis was "a major step in the history of chemistry", predating both Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Eduard Buchner.She proposed, and demonstrated through experiment, that many oxidation reactions occur only in the presence of water, that they directly involve water, and that water is regenerated and is detectable at the end of the reaction.