Talk:Friedel's salt
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Question on the Discovery of Friedel's salt: who is the real inventor ?[edit]
The following assertion is not certain and should be carefully verified:
"It was discovered by Georges Friedel, mineralogist and crystallographer, son of the famous French chemist Charles Friedel".[citation needed]
This point needs to be controlled: it is unclear if Friedel's salt was discovered by Charles, the father, or by his son Georges. The question is the following:
Charles Friedel, the co-inventor of the Friedel-Crafts reaction allowing a vast diversity of alkylation and acylation reactions in organic chemistry used aluminium chloride (AlCl3) as catalyst (Lewis acid) to perform his reaction. After hydrolysis, aluminium chloride gives rise to aluminium chloro-hydrate and finally to aluminium hydroxide, products not so far from the Friedel's salt if combined with calcium hydroxide. He could have been the first person to synthetise this subtance, but at his time X-ray diffraction (XRD) was not yet sufficiently mature to characterise the structure of the salt.
Georges Friedel, mineralogist and crystallographer has developped essential tools of calculation to determine the structure of the product by XRD. At his time, the Friedel's salt could also have been found in cement or concrete.
Was the father the person who synthetised first the Friedel's salt, or his son the one who identified it, is now very unclear for me.
A third hypothesis is that none of them was the inventor, but that it could have been invented by someone else, or even perhaps by the little son of Charles Friedel (third generation in a brilliant dynasty of scientists whose Jacques, the fourth in the name is also a physicist, and still alive !).
That is the problem to have four generations of exceptional people in the Friedel family. However, I do not know the third one. The fourth one biography is accessible on the French wiki: Jacques Friedel.
I have to dig more deeply in the literature to solve this question. In the meantime, I have left the uncertain assertion on the main page in order to attire reactions or criticisms if possible.
Should you have accurate references on the question, please do not hesitate to contribute and to clarify this issue. In advance, thanks a lot.
Shinkolobwe (talk) 21:16, 7 October 2008 (UTC)Shinkolobwe
It was invented in 1897 by Georges Friedel ![edit]
Nowadays, Friedel's salt discovery is relatively difficult to trace back from the recent literature, simply because it is an ancient finding of a poorly known and non-natural product. It has been synthesised and identified in 1897 by Georges Friedel, mineralogist and crystallographer, son of the famous French chemist Charles Friedel. Georges Friedel also synthesised calcium aluminate (1903) in the framework of his work on the macles theory (twin crystals). This point requires further verification. [citation needed]. [1]
Shinkolobwe (talk) 19:59, 10 October 2008 (UTC)Shinkolobwe