Frank C. Whitmore - Research and Publications

Research and Publications

While at the Pennsylvania State University Whitmore did his research on carbocations. The field of organic chemistry was struggling to explain how a compound with a double bonded carbon, an alkene, reacts with a halide compound. Whitmore worked on the findings of others and generalized the concept of molecules with a positively charged carbon atom, a carbocation, as an intermediate step in the addition of a halogen element.

Whitmore would go on to publish his findings in a paper titled "The Common Basis of Intramolecular Rearrangements." They were controversial at the time because many chemists, notably well known chemist Roger Adams, a critic of Whitmore's, believed that a molecule like a carbocation would never be stable enough to exist. Nevertheless, Whitmore published these findings which today are accepted as the most logical explanation for the reactions in question.

In 1937, Whitmore published Organic Chemistry, the first advanced organic chemistry textbook to be written in English. Whitmore worked on a revision of the book for several years, though the work was interrupted by World War II. The second edition of Organic Chemistry was published posthumously in 1951.