Abstract
An inorganic chemist working for a rocket manufacturing company has proved the textbooks wrong by generating significant amounts of elemental fluorine by purely chemical means for the first time. Remarkably, his simple, straightforward method involves reagents that have been known for at least 80 years. Chemists, including many notable ones, have tried to produce elemental fluorine chemically for at least 173 years, says Karl O. Christe of Rockwell International Corp.'s Rocketdyne Division in Canoga Park, Calif. All such attempts have failed. This sobering fact, he says, together with fluorine's well-established reputation as the most electronegative and most reactive element, has ingrained into chemists the notion that purely chemical—as opposed to electrochemical—reactions cannot liberate fluorine from its compounds. Christe set out to show that this wasn't necessarily so. He reasoned that a Lewis acid such as antimony pentafluoride (SbF 5 ) would react with a salt of the stable hexafluoromanganate(IV) ...
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