History
The term "Superacid" was first used in 1927 when James Bryant Conant found that perchloric acid could protonate ketones and aldehydes to form salts in nonaqueous solution. The term itself was coined by Gillespie later, after Conant combined sulphuric acid with fluorosulfuric acid, and found the solution to be several million times more acidic than sulfuric acid alone. The Magic Acid system was developed in the 1960s by George Olah, and was to be used to study stable carbocations. Gillespie also used the acid system to generate electron-deficient inorganic cations. The name originated after a Christmas party in 1966, when a member of the Olah lab placed a paraffin candle into the acid, and found that it dissolved quite rapidly. Examination of the solution with 1H-NMR showed a tert-butyl cation, suggesting that the paraffin chain that forms the wax had been cleaved, and then isomerized, to form the ion. The name appeared in a paper published by the Olah lab, and is now trademarked.
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