Erich Clar

Erich Clar (23 August 1902 – 27 March 1987) was a German organic chemist who studied polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon chemistry.

Biography Clar was born in Hřensko (a village directly at the border of Germany and the Czech Republic; Czech: Hřensko, German: Herrnskretschen), During world war II he had no participation and no party membership in the NSDAP and did research in his "Privatlabor Herrnskretschen" (private laboratory in Herrnskretschen/Hřensko) on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, especially on the acenes. He is considered as the father of that field.

In 1941, he authored "Aromatische Kohlenwasserstoffe" (Springer-Verlag) and in 1964 the greatly expanded two-volume Polycyclic Hydrocarbons, which described the syntheses, properties, and UV-visible absorption spectra of hundreds of PAHs. He discovered the Clar reaction of the cyclic ketone perinaphthenone to form in a 400 °C melt of zinc dust, zinc (II) chloride, and sodium chloride. He created the Sextet Theory, now eponymously called Clar's rule, to describe the behavior of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon isomers. This was described in his book The Aromatic Sextet.

Clar moved to Scotland in 1946 and worked in the chemistry department of the University of Glasgow from 1953 to 1972, the highest award given by that society to foreign scientists, and the first Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Research Award of the International Symposium on Polynuclear Aromatic Hydrocarbons in 1987.

He died aged 84 in 1987 at Estepona.