8 March 18

American chemist James Mason Crafts was born on this date in 1839. He is best known for his work with French chemist Charles Friedel in 1877 to develop the reactions that are known today as Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation. The general process of "electrophilic aromatic substitution" is pictured below, although the actual mechanism by which an "R" group (of carbon and hydrogen atoms) gets bonded to a benzene molecule is quite complicated. Alkylation and acylation are among the most basic and frequently-used steps in synthetic organic chemistry.