| A research student working
for Walter Kaminsky at the University of Hamburg was using a modified
Ziegler catalyst based on a titanium-based metallocene. Usually
the polymerisation was slow, so Kaminsky did not expect much from
the experiment. But the student obtained quite a lot of poly(ethene).
|
This was a perhaps lazy,
but honest, student. He admitted that he had not flushed the apparatus
out with nitrogen at the start, as he should have done. |
|
It took six months to sort out that it was water in the air,
and not oxygen, which was responsible for the polymerisation.
When a 1:1 mixture of triethylaluminium and water was used along
with the titanocene the rate of polymerisation went up a million
times.
|
