- Person
- George Olah
- Lived
- 1927–2017
- Field
- Organic chemistry
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
When crude oil is turned into petrol, and when raw materials are turned into plastics and many medicines, the reactions often pass through carbocations: molecules in which a carbon atom carries a positive charge. These ions are so reactive that they normally last only a tiny fraction of a second. For decades chemists argued about what they looked like, but no one could hold one still long enough to examine it.
George Olah, a Jewish chemist who had survived the war in hiding in Budapest and fled Hungary in 1956, solved the problem while working for Dow Chemical in Canada and then at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He used superacids, acid mixtures billions or even trillions of times stronger than concentrated sulphuric acid. In such a harsh environment a carbocation has nothing to react with, so it survives long enough to be studied with nuclear magnetic resonance and other instruments. One of his mixtures, fluorosulphuric acid with antimony pentafluoride, became famous as Magic Acid. With these tools he and his students mapped the structures of many carbocations, including unusual ones in which a carbon atom is bonded to five neighbours, and founded the field of superacid chemistry.
Seeing carbocations directly allowed chemists to understand and control the reactions that pass through them. Superacids also turned out to be powerful catalysts for rearranging hydrocarbons. Olah’s methods for converting straight-chain hydrocarbons into branched ones raised their octane rating, producing petrol that burns more smoothly and cleanly in an engine, and his work contributed to more efficient oil refining. At Dow, he said, his research helped improve industrial processes such as making ethylbenzene, the starting material for styrene plastics.
Olah received the 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to carbocation chemistry. He trained close to 300 students and co-workers at the University of Southern California and earlier posts, and his textbooks remain standard references for chemists who work with fuels and hydrocarbons.
Why it matters
Olah’s superacid chemistry helps refiners produce higher-octane, cleaner-burning fuel and helps industry make plastics and other products more efficiently.
About George Olah
Budapest-born refugee chemist who used superacids to capture fleeting carbon ions, leading to cleaner high-octane fuels, and who championed turning carbon dioxide into methanol. Nobel Prize 1994.
More about George Olah
Sources
- George A. Olah, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- George Olah, USC scientist who won Nobel Prize in chemistry, dies at 89 Bangor Daily News (Los Angeles Times)
- George Olah Jewish Virtual Library
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.