About Moses Gomberg
Moses Gomberg was a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Chemical Society. Gomberg was a mentor to Werner Emmanuel Bachmann who also carried on his work and together they discovered the Gomberg-Bachmann reaction. Gomberg was the first to successfully synthesize tetraphenylmethane. On the basis of his experimental evidence Gomberg concluded that he had discovered the first instance of a persistent radical and trivalent carbon. Gomberg and Bachmann later found that treatment of "hexaphenylethane" with magnesium resulted in a Grignard reagent, the first instance of the formation of such a compound from a hydrocarbon.
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