Now, in Nottingham, again I was fortunate – I should be blessed with good fortunes that go around, but in Nottingham, the head of the inorganic department was Cliff Addison, Cyril Clifford Addison. He’d been a teacher before the war, but set up a research group in Nottingham, and interestingly, he was one of the first people in England to be studying, what in Germany is called wasserähnlich lösungen, water-like solvents, solvents which are liquid at room temperature, but which have the ability to ionise the things that are dissolved in them, like water and ammonia. We’ve already rehearsed this because that was in the area that I was working in in Cambridge in the halogen chemistry and, indeed in the boron trifluoride work as well.

Cliff Addison chose to work in dinitrogen tetroxide which is a very reactive brown liquid, hard to handle until you learn how to do it, but has some very interesting chemistry associated with it.