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Who discovered the sandwich structure of ferrocene?
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organometallic compound
The periodic table of the elements, displaying the group numbers and the s, p, d, and f blocks. Elements in the shaded area are the metals of organometallic chemistry.
The sandwich structure of ferrocene was discovered independently by two chemists: the German theoretical chemist Ernst Otto Fischer and the British chemist Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson.12
Following the initial synthesis of ferrocene in 1951, both researchers independently concluded that the molecule consisted of a central iron atom positioned between two parallel, five-sided carbon rings. This breakthrough revealed a new class of organometallic compounds known as sandwich compounds. For their pioneering work in identifying this structure and their contributions to the field of organometallic chemistry, Fischer and Wilkinson were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973.123