Charles Friedel

Charles Friedel was a French chemist and mineralogist, born on 12 March 1832 and died on 20 April 1899. A native of Strasbourg, he was a student of Louis Pasteur at the Sorbonne, and in 1876 he became a professor of chemistry and mineralogy there. While at the Sorbonne he was elected an honorary member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1892. With James Crafts he developed in 1877 the Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation reactions, and he also attempted to make synthetic diamonds. His wife was the daughter of the engineer Charles Combes, and the Friedel family is a lineage of French scientists: his son Georges Friedel was a crystallographer and mineralogist, his grandson Edmond Friedel a mining engineer who founded the French geological survey BRGM, and his great-grandson Jacques Friedel a physicist.