racemic acid

Racemic acid is an old name for an optically inactive or racemic form of tartaric acid.

It is distinct from mesotartaric acid and was called racemic acid (from Latin racemus - "a bunch of grapes").

Thus Berzelius originally called the racemic form of aspartic acid paraaspartic acid (another obsolete term: racemic acid) in 1830.

The first known racemic mixture was "racemic acid", which Louis Pasteur found to be a mixture of the two enantiomeric isomers of tartaric acid.

With an excess of the racemic acid present, they observed the formation of the ester derived from (+)-mandelic acid to be quicker than the formation of the ester from ( )-mandelic acid.