In six years time free radical chemistry will be celebrating its hundredth birthday. It was Moses Gomberg who announced the birth of the first 'free' radical, the triphenylmethyl radical. in the Journals of the American and German Chemical Societies. Before Gomberg's time, the word 'radical' belonged to the science of nomenclature. and was used to describe those parts of molecules that remained unaltered during chemical reactions. It is interesting to note that Gomberg ended his article by mentioning that his investigations were continuing, and requesting that this research topic should be left to him for a time.
Whether as a result of that statement or because the time was not yet ripe, the fact is that free radical chemistry had only a shadowy existence up to about 1940. It was only with the discoveries of the peroxide effect and, more especially, of free rddical polymerization that interest in the topic was reawakened. Nowadays one cannot think of organic synthesis without including free radical chemistry, and new evidence of the importance of free radicals in processes that are vital to living organisms continues to emerge.
1940 was also the time when Derek Barton began work a t Imperial College, London, on his dissertation concerning the formation of vinyl chloride during the pyrolysis of 1 .?-dichloroethane. In Chapter 1 of the book reviewed here, Barton describes how this work gave him his first
Absorbing Free-Radical Chemistry
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