Sunlight and free radicals | Nature Chemistry

THOMAS TIDWELL reflects on the overlooked — but prescient — proposal by the British chemists Arthur Downes and Thomas Blunt for photochemical free-radical formation, decades before Moses

Gomberg launched the field of radical chemistry by preparing triphenylmethyl, the first stable organic radical. Access through your institution Buy or subscribe This is a preview of

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granddaughter of Thomas P. Blunt, in providing information for this manuscript is gratefully acknowledged. AUTHOR INFORMATION AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS * Thomas Tidwell is in the Department

of Chemistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H6, Canada. He was first exposed to free-radical chemistry as a graduate student at Harvard University in the laboratory of Paul D.

Bartlett. His work there involved carbocation chemistry and steric crowding, but he later drifted into the study of free radicals and of ketenes, Thomas Tidwell Authors * Thomas Tidwell

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