Norman Greenwood - Other people's interest in hydrides (147/252)

44 views · Published 24 July 2017 · 0:52 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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Born in Australia, the late Norman Greenwood (1925-2012) was an inorganic chemist whose research led to major advances in the chemistry of boron hydrides and pioneered the application of Mössbauer spectroscopy in the field of chemistry. [Listener: Brian Johnson; date recorded: 2011]
 
TRANSCRIPT: Now, in that area, we also did work with the aluminium and gallium hydrides, which I briefly mentioned before. The aluminium hydride work enormously excited the people at DuPont, because unbeknown to us, they had been working very hard on that, and, in fact, other people in the States had been working on some of the boron hydrides as potential rocket fuels, which I also didn’t know at that stage. But it did mean that we could get supplies of some of these things, particularly pentaborane, and decaborane as well at one stage, from the States, and that was very helpful in our work. Saved us making them.

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