A Pale Blue Gas: Part 1

It was the summer of 1984. I was in the first year of my graduate work and I was cleaning up a project initiated by a previous graduate student. Greg was remarkable. He had a gift for being able to prepare and isolate important compounds by accident. Halogen facilitated oxidation of group IV and V compounds? He discovered it by realizing that he had incorrectly added elemental halogen to a reaction. The cycloaddition of SNS+ to pi bonds? Discovered while he was trying to find a good solvent for SNSAsF6 and he tried acetonitrile and was unable to recover his solute. I had come along at the end of his run and picked up the SNS+ reactions with pi bonds and had started with alkynes. I had prepared a variety of compounds using the SNS+ / alkyne reaction and they had worked well. My supervisor Jack decided that I should go to England to learn how to do cyclic voltametry in liquid sulphur dioxide. That brought me into the sphere of Arthur a fragile, dedicated chemist of the collegial old school. It was in Durham that I was trying to do anion exchange reactions to get rid of the AsF6- anions so that the cyclic voltametry would work better (in fact it never did "work"). One day, late in the afternoon, I would wash a solution of CAT into a solution of potassium iodide and to my wondering eyes the whole flask filled with a pale blue gas. I knew all that had come before me and I knew that I had discovered something new. I was seeing something important for the first time and it was important and new not only for me but for my whole discipline. My real research career had begun.