How to reserve your place in history

In 1900, Moses Gomberg established himself as the grandfather of organic radical chemistry by describing the highly reactive triphenylmethyl (trityl) radical. Gomberg ended his landmark paper on this topic by saying, “This work will be continued and I wish to reserve the field for myself” (1).

Happily, this circumscription was readily ignored by subsequent generations, and organic radicals are now used in the production of a wide variety of plastics and synthetic rubber. Advances in organic radical chemistry throughout the 20th century have been key to our understanding of oxidative processes in normal living cells and in diseases such as cancer. Gomberg died in 1947, but his 1900 paper on the trityl radical remains a cornerstone of the field and was cited almost 100 times in the last decade, and 14 times in 2007 alone (data from Scopus).

(1) Gomberg, M. (1900) “An instance of trivalent carbon: Triphenylmethyl”, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol. 22, No. 11, pp. 757-771.