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Frank Clifford Whitmore (October 1, 1887 – June 24, 1947), nicknamed "Rocky", was a prominent chemist who submitted significant evidence for the existence ofcarbocation mechanisms in organic chemistry.
He was born in 1887 in the town ofNorth Attleborough,Massachusetts.
Whitmore earned both his bachelor's degree (1911) and Ph.D. (1914) fromHarvard University, where his Ph.D. advisor wasCharles Loring Jackson. Several prominent contemporaries of Whitmore at Harvard wereE.K. Bolton,Farrington Daniels,Roger Adams,James B. Sumner andJames Bryant Conant. After graduating from Harvard he became a professor and taught at theUniversity of Minnesota,Northwestern University, andThe Pennsylvania State University.
At Penn State, Whitmore served as the Dean of the School of Chemistry and Physics from 1929–1947, succeeding his former Harvard colleague Gerald Wendt in the position. He hired several prominent scientists as faculty members, includingRussell Marker and Merrell Fenske.
Whitmore was a member of several academic societies, namely theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences (1939),[1] theAmerican Philosophical Society (1943),[2] and the United StatesNational Academy of Sciences (1946).[3]
While at the Pennsylvania State University Whitmore did his research oncarbocations. The field of organic chemistry was struggling to explain how a compound with a double bonded carbon, analkene, reacts with ahalide compound. Whitmore worked on the findings of others and generalized the concept of molecules with a positively charged carbon atom, acarbocation, as an intermediate step in the addition of ahalogen element.
Whitmore would go on to publish his findings in a paper titled "The Common Basis of Intramolecular Rearrangements."[4] They were controversial at the time because many chemists, notably well known chemistRoger 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.
In 1937, Whitmore publishedOrganic Chemistry,[5] the first advanced organic chemistry textbook to be written in English.[citation needed] Whitmore worked on a revision of the book for several years, though the work was interrupted byWorld War II. The second edition ofOrganic Chemistry was published posthumously in 1951.
Whitmore was very active in theAmerican Chemical Society (ACS), holding several different offices in the organization throughout his life. In 1938, he served as president of ACS. During his presidency, he visited 72 of 104 local ACS sections. In 1937, Whitmore won the prizedWilliam H. Nichols Medal Award, given by the New York section of ACS. In 1945, Whitmore was awarded theWillard Gibbs Medal (considered to be the highest chemical honor in America) by the Chicago section of ACS.
Whitmore rarely slept. It was not rare for him work twenty hours a day, and take one-hour naps when he was tired.[citation needed]
Whitmore married Marion Gertrude Mason (who graduated from Radcliffe College with a degree in chemistry in 1912) in 1914. The Whitmores had four children: Frank Jr., Mason, Harry, and Marion, Jr ("Marionette").
Whitmore died in 1947 at the age of 59 as the result of a heart ailment.
Penn State'sWhitmore Laboratory is named after Whitmore.
