Moses Gomberg

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Moses Gomberg

Moses Gomberg (born February 8, 1866 in Jelisawetgrad, today Kropywnyzkyj ; † February 12, 1947 in Ann Arbor ) was a Ukrainian-born American chemist. He is considered a pioneer in radical chemistry.

life and work

Moses Gomberg came from a Jewish family in southern Ukraine. From 1878 to 1884 he attended the Nikolaus grammar school in Jelisavetgrad. When his father Georg Reznikow-Gomberg was threatened with arrest for political reasons, the family emigrated to Chicago in 1884 . There Gomberg studied chemistry at the University of Michigan and received his doctorate in 1894 under Albert Benjamin Prescott with the thesis Trimethylxanthine and some of its derivatives . From 1896 to 1897 he worked in Munich with Adolf von Baeyer and Victor Meyer in Heidelberg.

In 1900 Gomberg described the stable triphenylmethyl radical (trityl radical), which also bears his name. This was the first synthesis of an organic radical and opened the door to a new area of ​​chemistry: radical chemistry . Gomberg was nominated for the Nobel Prize, but narrowly missed the required number of votes. Further examples of reactive organic intermediates such as the ketenes by Hermann Staudinger (1905) soon followed.

He was also active in the field of reaction mechanisms . In 1914 he was admitted to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1920 to the American Philosophical Society .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biographical data, publications and academic family tree of Moses Gomberg at academictree.org, accessed on February 7, 2018.
  2. ^ Louis Fieser, Mary Fieser: Organische Chemie , Verlag Chemie Weinheim, 2nd edition, 1972, pp. 409-413, ISBN 3-527-25075-1 .
  3. ↑ Thomas T. Tidwell, The first century of Ketenes (1905-2005): the birth of a family of reactive intermediates, Angewandte Chemie, Int. Edition, Volume 44, 2005, pp. 5778-5785
  4. ↑ JM McBride, Tetrahedron, Volume 30, 1974, pp. 2009-2022
  5. ↑ M. Gomberg, Ber. Deutsche Chem. Ges., Volume 33, 1900, pp. 3150-3163, Gomberg, J. Am. Chem. Soc., Vol. 22, 1900, pp. 757-771
  6. ↑ According to Tidwell, Angew. Chemie, Vol. 44, 2005, p. 5778, citing L. Eberson, Chem. Intell., Vol. 57, 2000, pp. 44-49
  7. ^ Member History: Moses Gomberg. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 24, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Gomberg, Moses
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian-born American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Yelisavetgrad, today Kropywnyzkyj
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 1947
Place of death Ann Arbor