James Mason Crafts (March 8, 1839 – June 20, 1917) was an American chemist, mostly known for developing the Friedel–Crafts alkylation and acylation reactions with Charles Friedel in 1876.[1][2]
It was in Paris that Crafts first met Charles Friedel, with whom he later carried out some of his most successful research. Crafts returned to the United States in 1865. In 1868, he was appointed as the first professor of chemistry at the newly founded Cornell UniversityinIthaca, New York, where he remained until 1870.
During the following four years Crafts served as professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but in 1874 took a leave of absence, joined Friedel in Paris, and devoted himself exclusively to scientific research. Upon his second return to the United States, in 1891, Crafts became professor of organic chemistry at MIT (1892–97), where he also served as president from 1898 to 1900. In 1900, Crafts resigned the presidency, and again turned to the investigation of problems in organic and physical chemistry.
Craft's investigations were largely in the field of organic chemistry, but his name is connected also with many interesting achievements in physics and in physical chemistry. He invented a new hydrogenthermometer; measured the densities of iodine at very high temperatures; demonstrated an interesting regularity in the variation of the boiling points of chemically allied substances with the external pressure; prepared a number of new compounds of the elementsilicon, which are interesting because of their chemical resemblance to the corresponding compounds of carbon; and also prepared new compounds of arsenic. But his most important achievement was the discovery, jointly with Friedel, of one of the most fruitful synthetic methods in organic chemistry, the Friedel–Crafts reaction.
^Mason, Jeremiah; Hillard, George Stillman; Clark, Gilbert J. (Gilbert John) (1917). Memoir, autobiography and correspondence of Jeremiah Mason. University of Pittsburgh Library System. Kansas City, Mo. : Lawyers' International Publishing Co.
^Cross, Charles R. (November 1919). "James Mason Crafts"(PDF). Biographical Memoir of James Mason Crafts 1839 - 1917. 9. National Academy of Sciences, USA: 159–177.
