Notes

Charles Friedel, (born March 12, 1832, Strasbourg, Fr.—died April 20, 1899, Montauban), French organic chemist and mineralogist who, with the American chemist James Mason Crafts, discovered in 1877 the chemical process known as the Friedel-Crafts reaction. In 1854 Friedel entered C.A. Wurtz’s laboratory and in 1856 was appointed conservator of the mineralogical collections at the Superior National School of Mines. In 1871 he began to lecture at the École Normale and in 1876 became professor of mineralogy at the Sorbonne, but on the death of Wurtz in 1884 he exchanged that position for the chair of organic chemistry.
He collaborated in efforts to form diamonds artificially, studied the pyroelectric properties of crystals, determined crystallographic constants, and did research on ketone and aldehyde compounds. Friedel was the chief founder of Revue Générale de Chimie in 1899.

James Crafts was born in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard University in 1858. Although he never received his Ph.D., he studied chemistry in Germany at the Academy of Mines (1859) of Freiberg, and served as an assistant to Robert Bunsen at Heidelberg, and then with Wurtz in Paris (1861).
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 University in Ithaca, New York, where he remained until 1870.
During the following four years Crafts served as professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (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. In recognition of Crafts's services to science, the French government made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor (1885), and the British Association for the Advancement of Science made him one of its corresponding members. Harvard University conferred on him the honorary degree of LL.D. in 1898. The Crafts entry at MIT's Senior House dormitory is named in his honor.

The Friedel–Crafts reactions are a set of reactions developed by Charles Friedel and James Crafts in 1877 to attach substituents to an aromatic ring. There are two main types of Friedel–Crafts reactions: alkylation reactions and acylation reactions. Both proceed by electrophilic aromatic substitution. The general reaction scheme is shown below.
Friedel–Crafts alkylation involves the alkylation of an aromatic ring with an alkyl halide using a strong Lewis acid catalyst. With anhydrous ferric chloride as a catalyst, the alkyl group attaches at the former site of the chloride ion.
This reaction has one big disadvantage, namely that the product is more nucleophilic than the reactant due to the electron donating alkyl-chain. Therefore, another hydrogen is substituted with an alkyl-chain, which leads to overalkylation of the molecule. Also, if the chloride is not on a tertiary carbon or secondary carbon, then the carbocation formed (R+) will undergo a carbocation rearrangement reaction. This reactivity is due to the relative stability of the tertiary and secondary carbocation over the primary carbocations.
Hundreds of new carbon compounds have been brought into existence by this method (New International Encyclopedia), which is based on the catalytic action of the chloride of aluminium.
References:
Charles Friedel. (2015). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://0-global.britannica.com.millenium.itesm.mx/EBchecked/topic/220120/Charles-Friedel