Frank C. Whitmore

Frank Clifford Whitmore (October 1, 1887 – June 24, 1947), nicknamed "Rocky", was a prominent chemist who submitted significant evidence for the existence of carbocation mechanisms in organic chemistry.

He was born in 1887 in the town of North Attleborough, Massachusetts.

Whitmore earned both his bachelor's degree (1911) and Ph.D. (1914) from Harvard University, where his Ph.D. advisor was 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.

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, including Russell Marker and Merrell Fenske.

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.

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