Frank C. Whitmore

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Frank C. Whitmore, nicknamed "Rocky", was a chemist who submitted the best piece of evidence for a carbocation mechanism in organic chemistry.

Frank C. Whitmore, who published as F.C. Whitmore, was born in 1887 in the town of North Attleborough, Massachusetts. Whitmore was educated and got his Ph.D. from Harvard University where he worked with Charles Loring Jackson. Several prominent contemporaries of Whitmore at Harvard were E.K. Bolton, Farrington Daniels, Roger Adams, James B. Sumner and James Bryant Conant. After graduating from Harvard he became a professor and taught at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and The Pennsylvania State University. While at the Pennsylvania State University Whitmore did his research on carbocations. The field of organic chemistry was struggling to explain how a compound with a double bonded carbon, an alkene, reacts with a halide compound. Whitmore worked on the findings of others and generalized the concept of molecules with a positively charged carbon atom, a carbocation, as an intermediate step in the addition of a halogen element.

Whitmore would go on to publish his findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1932 Volume 54 Pp. 3274-3283. They were controversial at the time because many chemists, notably well known chemist Roger Adams a critic of Whitmore's, believed that a molecule like a carbocation would never be stable enough to exist. Nevertheless, Whitmore published these findings which today are accepted as the most logical explanation for the reactions in question. Whitmore also authored an advanced textbook in organic chemistry.

It is interesting to note that Whitmore rarely slept. It was not rare for him work twenty hours a day, and take one hour naps when he was tired.