The Historical Development of the Concepts Underlying the Design and Construction of Targeted Coordination Polymers/MOFs: A Personal Account

Abstract Presented here is a personal account of how the ideas and concepts underlying the design and construction of coordination polymers/MOFs developed historically ‐ from the earliest conjectures in the 1970’s about the possibility of using pre‐organized building blocks to construct targeted polymeric structures, to the initial experimental implementation of these ideas in the mid‐80’s and to the introduction of the name MOFs in the 90’s. The early exploratory work with pre‐organized building blocks described in this article paved the way for the subsequent explosion of research activity in the CP/MOF area and for the generation of an essentially unlimited range of designed coordination polymer structures promising a variety of useful properties.