Carbocation - History

History

The history of carbocations dates back to 1891 when G. Merling reported that he added bromine to tropylidene (cycloheptatriene) and then heated the product to obtain a crystalline, water soluble material, C₇H₇Br. He did not suggest a structure for it; however Doering and Knox convincingly showed that it was tropylium (cycloheptatrienylium) bromide. This ion is predicted to be aromatic by Hückel's rule.

In 1902, Norris and Kehrman independently discovered that colorless triphenylmethanol gave deep yellow solutions in concentrated sulfuric acid. Triphenylmethyl chloride similarly formed orange complexes with aluminium and tin chlorides. In 1902, Adolf von Baeyer recognized the salt-like character of the compounds formed.

He dubbed the relationship between color and salt formation halochromy of which malachite green is a prime example.

Carbocations are reactive intermediates in many organic reactions. This idea, first proposed by Julius Stieglitz in 1899 was further developed by Hans Meerwein in his 1922 study of the Wagner-Meerwein rearrangement. Carbocations were also found to be involved in the S_N1 reaction, the E1 reaction, and in rearrangement reactions such as the Whitmore 1,2 shift. The chemical establishment was reluctant to accept the notion of a carbocation and for a long time the Journal of the American Chemical Society refused articles that mentioned them.

The first NMR spectrum of a stable carbocation in solution was published by Doering et al. in 1958. It was the heptamethylbenzenium ion, made by treating hexamethylbenzene with methyl chloride and aluminium chloride. The stable 7-norbornadienyl cation was prepared by Story et al. in 1960 by reacting norbornadienyl chloride with silver tetrafluoroborate in sulfur dioxide at −80 °C. The NMR spectrum established that it was non-classically bridged (the first stable non-classical ion observed).

In 1962, Olah directly observed the tert-butyl carbocation by nuclear magnetic resonance as a stable species on dissolving tert-butyl fluoride in magic acid. The NMR of the norbornyl cation was first reported by Schleyer et al. and it was shown to undergo proton-scrambling over a barrier by Saunders et al.