Gavriil Gavrilovich Gustavson (1842-1908) was a chemist whose name is rarely, if ever, mentioned in organic chemistry textbooks (at least in the English-speaking world). However, a close examination of his work, performed under very humble conditions, reveals that he made several important discoveries with lasting impact in the fields of inorganic, organic, and agricultural chemistry. Gustavson was born, educated, and spent the first (until the 1870s) and last parts (starting in the 1890s) of his scientific career in Saint Petersburg. In the interim period, he took several short trips abroad and also to Kiev and Kazan, and worked in Moscow. When the Russian Chemical Society was founded and approved in 1868, he was one of the first 47 members, and a prolific contributor to the Zhurnal Russkogo Himicheskogo (since 1873 – Himicheskogo i Fizicheskogo) Obshchestva, where, just over the first decade (1869-1879) of the Journal, he published 14 papers, the total number of which eventually grew to 43. As part of his dissertation, he first studied “double decomposition” or exchange reactions between halides and oxides and his results were essential for the understanding of the relative halo- and oxophilicities of the elements. He then turned his attention to what would later be named electrophilic halogenation of aromatic compounds in the presence of aluminum halides and published his findings in 1877, i.e., just at the time when Friedel and Crafts announced their discovery of aromatic electrophilic alkylation using alkyl halides and aluminum halides. Gustavson dedicated a lot of effort to studying the mechanism of aluminum halide-catalyzed reactions. Another chemical transformation discovered by Gustavson and still used today was the elimination of halogen from vicinal dihaloalkanes in the presence of zinc. Using this approach, he and Nikolay Demyanov (1861-1938) synthesized allene in 1888. The reaction between dihaloalkenes and zinc was employed to prepare a number of cycloalkenes. Gutavson taught and published a textbook on agricultural chemistry, in which he described not only mineral fertilizers but also the action of soil microorganisms. Last but not least, he was a brilliant lecturer who taught chemistry at schools for women for many years.

Exploring the reactivity of halogen compounds: Gustavson’s contributions to chemistry

2019 Fall National Meeting

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