Archive for the ‘Historical’ Category
Wednesday, January 20th, 2021
The quote of the post title comes from R. B. Woodward explaining the genesis of the discovery of what are now known as the Woodward-Hoffmann rules for pericyclic reactions.[1] I first wrote about this in 2012, noting that “for (that) blog, I do not want to investigate the transition states”. Here I take a closer look at this aspect.
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References
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R.B. Woodward, and R. Hoffmann, "Stereochemistry of Electrocyclic Reactions", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 87, pp. 395-397, 1965. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja01080a054
Posted in crystal_structure_mining, Historical, Interesting chemistry, pericyclic | No Comments »
Thursday, November 5th, 2020
In Internet terms, 23 years ago is verging on pre-history. Much of what was happening around 1997 on the Web was still highly experimental and so its worth taking a look at some of this to see how it has survived or whether it can be “curated” into a form that would still be useful. I had noted in my earlier comment a site which early on had become non-functional and then speculated whether any volunteers might have suggestions for how to best rescue it.
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Posted in Historical | 3 Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2020
With universities around the world having to very rapidly transition to blended learning (a mixture of virtual and face-2-face experiences) with a very large component based on online materials, I thought it might be interesting to try to give one snapshot of when the online experience started to happen in chemistry.
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Posted in Historical | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 6th, 2019
Text books often show the following diagram, famously consolidated over many years by Emil Fischer from 1891 onwards. At the top sits D-(+)-glyceraldehyde, to which all the monosaccharides below are connected by painstaking chemical transformations.
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Posted in Chiroptics, Historical | No Comments »
Saturday, November 30th, 2019
Some areas of science progressed via very famous predictions that were subsequently verified by experiments. Think of Einstein and gravitational waves or of Dirac and the positron. There are fewer well-known examples in chemistry; perhaps Watson and Crick’s prediction of the structure of DNA, albeit based on the interpretation of an existing experimental result. Here I take a look at a what if, that of John Kirkwood’s prediction of the absolute configuration of a small molecule based entirely on matching up the sign of a measured optical rotation with that predicted by (his) theory.
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Posted in Chiroptics, Historical | 6 Comments »
Thursday, October 18th, 2018
The Royal Society of Chemistry historical group (of which I am a member) organises two or three one day meetings a year. Yesterday the October meeting covered (amongst other themes) the fascinating history of madder and its approximately synthetic equivalent alizarin. Here I add a little to the talk given by Alan Dronsfield on the synthesis of alizarin and the impact this had on the entire industry.
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Tags:Alan Dronsfield, Alizarin, Anthraquinone dyes, Art materials, BASF, Carl Graebe, Carl Gräbe, Carl Liebermann, Carl Theodore Liebermann, Catechols, Colors, cryoEM MicroEM, Dihydroxyanthraquinones, Dye, Mauve, Mauveine, Rapid structure determination of microcrystalline molecular compounds, Royal Society of Chemistry, Shades of violet, William Bragg, William Perkin
Posted in Historical | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 28th, 2017
I started this story by looking at octet expansion and hypervalence in non-polar hypercoordinate species such as S(-CH3)6, then moved on to S(=CH2)3. Finally now its the turn of S(≡CH)2.‡
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Tags:1-Decyne, CH2, chemical bonding, free energy, G. N. Lewis, Lewis structure, Music, Octet
Posted in Historical, Hypervalency | 3 Comments »
Saturday, June 10th, 2017
In an earlier post, I lamented the modern difficulties in running old instances of Jmol, an example of an application program written in the Java programming language. When I wrote that, I had quite forgotten a treasure trove of links to old Java that I had collected in 1996-7 and then abandoned. Here I browse through a few of the things I found.
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Tags:Alan Tongue, City: London, City: Paris, Company: Sun Microsystems, computing, Computing platforms, Country: Poland, Darek Bogdal, Guillaume Cottenceau, Java, Java platform, jmol, Person Travel, Roman law, Wyn Locke
Posted in Historical | 5 Comments »
Friday, February 10th, 2017
The book of the title has recently appeared giving a rich and detailed view over 417 pages, four appendices and 24 pages of photographs of how a university chemistry department in the UK came into being in 1845 and its subsequent history of discoveries, Nobel prizes and much more. If you have ever wondered what goes on in an academic department, populated by and large by very bright and clever personalities and occasionally some highly eccentric ones, then go dip into this book.
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Tags:2001-2050, Alfred Nobel, Bill Griffith, Country: United Kingdom, Education, Entertainment/Culture, Hannah Gay, Nobel Prize
Posted in Historical | 4 Comments »
Thursday, February 2nd, 2017
Almost exactly 20 years ago, I started what can be regarded as the precursor to this blog. As part of a celebration of this anniversary,[1] I revisited the page to see whether any of it had withstood the test of time. Here I recount what I discovered.
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References
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P.W. May, S.A. Cotton, K. Harrison, and H.S. Rzepa, "The ‘Molecule of the Month’ Website—An Extraordinary Chemistry Educational Resource Online for over 20 Years", Molecules, vol. 22, pp. 549, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/molecules22040549
Tags:10.5517, Advertising & Marketing - NEC, chemical context, chemical markup language, City: London, Commercial REITs - NEC, Company: Chime, Company: Eastman Kodak, Company: First Industrial, digital cameras, Digital Object Identifier, food additives, HTML, Imperial College, industrial strength HTML editor, Java, JavaScript, manufacturing factory, mauveine using molecular modelling software, Person Attributes, Photographic Equipment, Technology/Internet, validation tool, Web, web archaeology, web server, XML, year old Web pages
Posted in Chemical IT, Historical | 1 Comment »
