Abstract
In a four-day symposium covering most of the developments of free radical chemistry, one retrospective paper seems appropriate to give some picture of the history of our field and how it got where it is. My title, "Forty Years of Free Radicals," was chosen for two reasons. First, although free radical chemistry really dates back to Moses Gomberg's discovery of triphenylmethyl, and the idea of small free radicals as intermediates in high temperature gas phase reactions had had considerable development in the early '30's, 1937 was a crucial year in the recognition that free radicals might be important in ordinary liquid-phase organic chemistry. It was in that year that Hey and Waters suggested that the arylation of aromatics by benzoyl peroxide was a radical process (1) and also that Kharasch proposed that the abnormal addition of hydrogen bromide, which he and Mayo had recognized in 1933 was a radical chain
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