Mechanistic turn in inorganic textbooks: Basolo and Pearson's Mechanisms of Inorganic Reactions

Widespread interest in mechanistic work among Inorg. chemists did not really appear until the 1950s, considerably later than for their org. colleagues. Ronald Nyholm and others have identified a mid-century "renaissance" of inorg. chem., and the turn towards mechanism played a major part in that development. I will discuss the central role of Fred Basolo and Ralph Pearson's 1958 monograph "Mechanisms of Inorg. Reactions" in influencing that turn, based upon a combined horizontal and vertical sampling of inorg. textbooks around that period.