Early developments in organometallic chemistry include Louis Claude Cadets synthesis of methyl arsenic compounds related to cacodyl, William Christopher Zeises platinum-ethylene complex, Edward Franklands discovery of diethyl- and dimethylzinc, Ludwig Monds discovery of Ni(CO), and Victor Grignard's organomagnesium compounds.  (Although not always acknowledged as an organometallic compound, Prussian blue, a mixed-valence iron-cyanide complex, was first prepared in 1706 by paint maker Johann Jacob Diesbach as the first coordination polymer and synthetic material containing a metal-carbon bond.) The abundant and diverse products from coal and petroleum led to Ziegler–Natta, Fischer–Tropsch, hydroformylation catalysis which employ CO, H, and alkenes as feedstocks and ligands.
Recognition of organometallic chemistry as a distinct subfield culminated in the Nobel Prizes to Ernst Fischer and Geoffrey Wilkinson for work on metallocenes. In 2005, Yves Chauvin, Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock shared the Nobel Prize for metal-catalyzed olefin metathesis.