Professor Hiroo Inokuchi and his colleagues discovered in 1950 that organic compounds such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, previously believed to be insulators, exhibited considerable electrical conductivity. He confirmed experimentally that this conductivity was from the π-electrons of organic molecules in these materials. He also found in 1954 that a charge-transfer complex of perylene-bromine exhibited conductivity as high as that of metal. He studied a series of organic conductors and superconductors based on charge-transfer salts like BEDT-TTF. His discovery of conductive and semi-conductive characters in organic substances opened up a new era of materials science, and in the following years the electric properties of organic materials become one of the most important research subjects in solid state chemistry and physics.
