With increasing frequency, today’s chemists are sending their students off in search of Victorian-era scientific reports. These obscure, 19th-century references to the work of organic chemistry’s earliest practitioners are now appearing among the endnotes of an exploding number of present-day journal articles.
The reason? Researchers have recently become focused on recapitulating a century’s worth of chemistry in an utterly new way. This time around, they hope to use a tantalizing new repertoire of solvents, known as ionic liquids, that can get the job done without the stink, mess, pollution, and toxicity of the workhorse solvents that have characterized much of organic chemistry so far.