Personal Recollections of Hans Meerwein

Hans Meerwein was and always will be one of my heroes in chemistry. He introduced, ahead of Ingold and Robinson, the age of physical measurements into organic chemistry. At the same time his major aims always remained to find new methods and reactions of general synthetic utility. By his choice he was not interested in the synthesis of complex, large molecules, but in fundamental reactions and methods. He disliked narrow categories. He never considered himself to be a physical organic or synthetic chemist. He simply was a master chemist. 

My first contact with Meerwein was in 1954 when I received, while still working in isolated Hungary, a letter from him. He had read a paper of ours, and offered useful comments, even pointing out that we had missed a relevant reference. We subsequently kept up correspondence. He continued to be interested in our early efforts to obtain long lived carbocations from alkyl (and acyl) fluorides in liquid boron trifluoride (and other Lewis acid halides) at low temperature, as well as via metathetic reactions of organic halides with silver tetrafluoroborate (a reagent we introduced in 1955 for the ionization of bromocyclohexadienes to form benzenium ions and which Meerwein developed to a wide utility akylation method). 

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