FRIEDEL, CHARLES (1832-99), French chemist and mineralogist, was born at Strasbourg on March 12, 183 2. In he entered C. A. Wurtz's laboratory, and in 1856 was appointed conservator of the mineralogical collections at the Ec le des Mines. In 1871 he began to lecture at the Ecole Normale, and in 1876 he became professor of mineralogy at the Sorbonne, but on the death of Wurtz in 1884 he exchanged that position for the chair of organic chemistry. He died at Montauban on April 20, 1899. Friedel worked both in mineralogy and organic chemistry. He collaborated from 1879 to 1887 with Emile Edmond Sarasin on the formation of minerals by artificial means. In 1893, as the result of an attempt to make diamond by the action of sulphur on highly carburetted cast iron at 45o°-500° C he ob tained a black powder too small in quantity to be analysed but hard enough to scratch corundum. He also devoted much atten tion to the pyroelectric phenomena of crystals, to the determina tion of crystallographic constants, and to the study of the ketones • and aldehydes. In 1862 he prepared isopropyl alcohol, and in 1863, with J. M. Crafts (1839-1917), he obtained various organic compounds of silicon. A few years later further work, with A. Ladenburg, on silicon yielded silicochloroform and led to a demon stration of the close analogy existing between silicon and carbon. In 1871, with R. D. da Silva he synthesized glycerin, starting from propylene. In 1877, with Crafts, he described the valuable method for synthesizing benzene homologues, generally known as the "Friedel and Crafts reaction" ; it was based on an accidental ob servation of the action of metallic aluminium on amyl chloride. The method consists in bringing together a hydrocarbon and an organic chloride in presence of aluminium chloride, when the resi dues of the two compounds unite to form a more complex body. Friedel was associated with Wurtz in editing the latter's Diction naire de chimie, and undertook the supervision of the supplements issued after 1884. He was the chief founder of the Revue generale de chimie in 1899. His publications include a Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Wurtz (1885), Cours de chimie organique (188 7) and Cours de mineralogie (1893) .
See memorial lecture by J. M. Crafts, printed in the Journal of the London Chemical Society (1900) .