7/11/2012 - Generation of Alkyl Radicals

The next year in 1929 one of the pioneers of radio chemistry, Friedrich Adolf Paneth, an Austrian scientist who did the majority of his early work at Königsberg University, completed a journey set out by Sir Edward Frankland.  This discovery gained humanity the ability to create alkyl radicals, and the identification of such radicals through their ability to displace a metallic mirror (silver mirror etc.).  This was performed through the pyrolysis (thermal decomposition) of a lead organometallic with the general formula of PbR_4.