Not a computer in sight! I refer to a chemistry lab from the 1800s I was recently taken to, where famous french chemists such as Joseph Gay-Lussac, Michel Chevreul and Edmond Fremy were professors. Although not used for chemistry any more, it is an incredible treasure trove of objects. Here are photos of some.
Archive for the ‘Historical’ Category
An original chemistry lab from the early 19th century.
Sunday, May 18th, 2014A golden age for (computational) spectroscopy.
Monday, April 2nd, 2012I mentioned in my last post an unjustly neglected paper from that golden age of 1951-1953 by Kirkwood and co. They had shown that Fischer’s famous guess for the absolute configurations of organic chiral molecules was correct. The two molecules used to infer this are shown below.
Confirming the Fischer convention as a structurally correct representation of absolute configuration.
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012I wrote in an earlier post how Pauling’s Nobel prize-winning suggestion in February 1951 of a (left-handed) α-helical structure for proteins[cite]10.1073/pnas.37.4.205[/cite] was based on the wrong absolute configuration of the amino acids (hence his helix should really have been the right-handed enantiomer). This was most famously established a few months later by Bijvoet’s[cite]10.1038/168271a0[/cite] definitive crystallographic determination of the absolute configuration of rubidium tartrate, published on August 18th, 1951 (there is no received date, but a preliminary communication of this result was made in April 1950). Well, a colleague (thanks Chris!) just wandered into my office and he drew my attention to an article by John Kirkwood[cite]10.1063/1.1700491[/cite] published in April 1952, but received July 20, 1951,‡ carrying the assertion “The Fischer convention is confirmed as a structurally correct representation of absolute configuration“, and based on the two compounds 2,3-epoxybutane and 1,2-dichloropropane. Neither Bijvoet nor Kirkwood seem aware of the other’s work, which was based on crystallography for the first, and quantum computation for the second. Over the years, the first result has become the more famous, perhaps because Bijvoet’s result was mentioned early on by Watson and Crick in their own very famous 1953 publication of the helical structure of DNA. They do not mention Kirkwood’s result. Had they not been familiar with Bijvoet’s[cite]10.1038/168271a0[/cite] result, their helix too might have turned out a left-handed one!
Henry Armstrong: almost an electronic theory of chemistry!
Monday, November 7th, 2011Henry Armstrong studied at the Royal College of Chemistry from 1865-7 and spent his subsequent career as an organic chemist at the Central College of the Imperial college of Science and technology until he retired in 1912. He spent the rest of his long life railing against the state of modern chemistry, saving much of his vitriol against (inter alia) the absurdity of ions, electronic theory in chemistry, quantum mechanics and nuclear bombardment in physics. He snarled at Robinson’s and Ingold’s new invention (ca 1926-1930) of electronic arrow pushing with the put down “bent arrows never hit their marks“.‡ He was dismissed as an “old fogy, stuck in a time warp about 1894.”‡ So why on earth would I want to write about him? Read on…