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Acknowledgements Authentic mauveine and Schunk’s mauveine were kindly provided from the Beaufoy-Kirkpatrick Collection, Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester. The National Mass Spectrometry Service Centre provided mass spectra.

A commemorative symposium took place on the 16th June 2014 in the Magnus House in Berlin on the occasion of the 150th birthday of Walter Nernst. This Essay outlines the important stages in his life and consider the main features in the development of the discipline cofounded by him.

The Zintl-Klemm concept (ZKC) is a combination of a valence electron counting rule and a set of structure-chemical considerations which works well for a continuously growing class of compounds between classical salts and classical covalent compounds on the on hand, and intermetallic phases on the other. In this historical article the lines of development of the ZKC are reviewed. They originate from Eduard Zintl in Darmstadt and were carried on and extended by Wilhelm Klemm in Munster, early on. After World War II different schools developed their own points of view on the ZKC which converged in the 1990s, backed by blossoming quantum mechanical schemes of treating complex solids. The limits of applicability of the ZKC are subject of ongoing investigations, still, and it seems that the concept has reached a state of quite general acceptance in solid state sciences.

2012/2013 mark the 100th anniversary of von Laue’s diffraction of X-rays from single crystals of copper sulfate, the postulation of Bragg’s law, and the solution of the first X-ray structure. However, even before 1912, the study of crystals was an integral part of chemistry and it played a major role in development of modern chemical science, including key concepts such as atoms, molecules, isomerism, and chirality.

By the year 1913, a number of revolutionary events had begun to transform the landscape of physics. In 1900, Max Planck (1858–1947) had proposed that energy radiated in quanta or packets. The announcement of the photoelectric effect in 1905 by an unassuming Swiss patent worker by the name of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) clearly implicated that light energy, or the photon, later coined by Gilbert N. Lewis (1875–1946) in 1926, was also quantized and showed unprecedented particle-like properties. More startling was the discovery by Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) who demonstrated that the atom consisted of a hard positive center surrounded by electrons. Niels Bohr (1885–1962), then a young postgraduate, was deeply involved in understanding the structure of the atom. He needed physical or experimental evidence to substantiate his intuitive ideas. Ironically, that evidence had already been published in the year of his birth by Johann J. Balmer (1825–1898), a Swiss mathematics teacher at a secondary school for girls.

Beginning early in the 19th century, developments in crystallography, optics, and chemistry in France set the stage for the discovery of molecular chirality by Louis Pasteur in 1848. He found that the crystallization of the sodium ammonium salt of ‘paratartaric acid’, a mysterious ‘isomer’ of natural (+)-tartaric acid (TA), produced two different crystal types that were non-superimposable mirror-image forms of each other. He separated the two types and found their optical rotations in solution opposite in direction and equal in absolute magnitude. This led him to conclude that paratartaric acid is a combination of two mirror-image molecule types of TA that are ‘dissymmetric’, an existing term he adapted to the connotation of today's ‘chiral’. In 1857, he found that the two enantiomers of TA were metabolized by a microorganism at drastically different rates, and thereby discovered biological enantioselectivity. In 1886, Italian chemist Arnaldo Piutti discovered D-asparagine and found that it tasted intensely sweet, in contrast to the known L-asparagine which had no taste. This was the discovery of stereoselectivity at biological receptors. As a result of advances in stereoselective synthesis and enantioselective chromatography during the last decades of the 20th century, in the 1990s the importance of molecular chirality in drug action and disposition began to receive serious attention from drug-regulatory authorities and the pharmaceutical industry, the overall result of which has been the near-complete disappearance of racemic drugs as newly introduced pharmaceuticals.

This perspective delineates the history of the National Organic Chemistry Symposium (NOS) and, in doing so, traces the development of organic chemistry over the past 88 years. The NOS is the premier event sponsored by the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry (ORGN) and has been held in odd-numbered years since 1925, with the exceptions of 1943 and 1945. During the 42 symposia, 332 chemists have given 549 plenary lectures. The role the NOS played in the launch of TheJournal of Organic Chemistry and Organic Reactions and the initiation of the Roger Adams Award are discussed. Representative examples highlighting the chemistry presented in each era are described, and the evolution of the field is examined by assigning each NOS talk to one of seven subdisciplines and analyzing how the number of talks in each subdiscipline has changed over time. Comparisons of the demographics of speakers, attendees, and ORGN members are made, and superlatives are noted. Personal interest stories of the speakers are discussed, alo...

August Wilhelm Hofmann, 1818–1892, discovered many of the functional groups of organophosphorus chemistry, including primary, secondary, and tertiary phosphines, oxides and sulfides of the latter, phosphonic and phosphinic acids and their chloro derivatives, dithiophosphinic acids, tetraalkyl phosphonium hydroxides, and Lewis salts from both tertiary phosphines and their oxides. Some of his procedures are still in use today. Some fundamental properties of these groups were also discovered. In spite of these contributions, much current literature fails to recognize him as the founder of the field, generally giving credit to Carl Arnold August Michaelis and sometimes to Alexander E. Arbuzov, both of whom followed Hofmann chronologically. The contributions of Michaelis and Arbusov were indeed most impressive and extensive. However, the case made in this paper, established by studying the original German literature, will be that August W. Hofmann deserves recognition as the originator of the field of organophosphorus chemistry, indeed as the founding father of the field.

In 1962, Neil Bartlett published a terse note in Proc. Chem. Soc. eradicating the long held dogma that noble gases are inert and cannot form stable compounds. This historical discovery has revolutionized our views on chemistry and has given rise to thousands of papers on noble gas chemistry. The fact that his proposed reaction product “Xe+[PtF6]−” has eluded experimental detection for more than half a century and actually was a mixture of XeF+ and Xe2F3+ salts does not diminish the enormous impact of his discovery. A plausible explanation for the failures to observe “Xe+[PtF6]−” experimentally is presented.

Alfred Werner defined the basics of coordination chemistry, work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1913. This short article looks at his contributions and highlights how his legacy dominates coordination chemistry to this day.

A new age dawned when 22-year-old William Lawrence Bragg realized that the observations of X-ray diffraction by a crystal can be interpreted very simply as arising from the reflection of the X-rays by planes of atoms in the crystal. In the 100 years since this insight X-ray diffraction has transformed chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy, and, most recently, biology.

Review: developments of ten examples of conventional organic syntheses are traced from 1976 till today; ca. 160 refs.

In 2010, Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, and Akira Suzuki joined the prestigious circle of Nobel Laureate chemists for their roles in discovering and developing highly practical methodologies for C-C bond construction. From their original contributions in the early 1970s the landscape of the strategies and methods of organic synthesis irreversibly changed for the modern chemist, both in academia and in industry. In this Review, we attempt to trace the historical origin of these powerful reactions, and outline the developments from the seminal discoveries leading to their eminent position as appreciated and applied today.

The Biginelli dihydropyrimidine synthesis is one of the most important and oldest multicomponent reactions and has been extensively investigated in terms of application and mechanism. Surprisingly, little information is available on its discoverer, the Piedmontese chemist Pietro Biginelli, who also carried out the first studies on the purification and characterization of the (in)famous Gosio's gas. The reasons for the lack of a current biography on Biginelli can be traced back to his early demise from the research community. This, combined with the prematurity of bio-organometallic chemistry and the scarce popularity of pyrimidines before the discovery of their biological relevance, resulted in a paradoxical situation that led Biginelli to be remembered mostly for his administrative merits and career. By capitalizing on original documentation retrieved in archives or provided by his family, we present an account of the life of this forgotten chemist in the context of his contemporary chemical research.

In the gallery of famous people tracing their origins to Wroc{\l}aw, few are as controversial, as complex, or as tragic as Fritz Haber, ever more distant in the flux of time, yet still stirring emotions. He developed a method for the direct synthesis of ammonia from its elements and later pioneered chemical warfare on the battlefields of the First World War.

We outline the institutional history and highlight aspects of the scientific history of the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI) of the Max Planck Society, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, from its founding in 1911 until about the turn of the 21st century. Established as one of the first two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the Institute began as a much-awaited remedy for what prominent German chemists warned was the waning of Germany’s scientific and technological superiority relative to the United States and to other European nations. The history of the Institute has largely paralleled that of 20th century Germany. It spearheaded the research and development of chemical weapons during World War I, then experienced a “golden era” during the 1920s and early 1930s, in spite of financial hardships. Under the National Socialists it suffered a purge of its scientific staff and a diversion of its research into the service of the new regime, accompanied by a breakdown in its international relations. In the immediate aftermath of World War II it suffered crippling material losses, from which it recovered slowly in the postwar era. In 1952, the Institute took the name of its founding director and the following year joined the fledgling Max Planck Society, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Institute supported diverse research into the structure of matter and electron microscopy in its geographically isolated and politically precarious location in West Berlin. In subsequent decades, as Berlin benefited from the policies of detente and later glasnost and the Max Planck Society continued to reassess its preferred model of a research institute, the FHI reorganized around a board of coequal scientific directors and renewed its focus on the investigation of elementary processes on surfaces and interfaces, topics of research that had been central to the work of Fritz Haber and the first “golden era” of the Institute. Throughout its one-hundred-year history, the Institute’s pace-setting research has been shaped by dozens of distinguished scientists, among them seven Nobel laureates. Here we highlight the contributions made at the Institute to the fields of gas-phase kinetics and dynamics, early quantum physics, colloid chemistry, electron microscopy, and surface chemistry, and we give an account of the key role the Institute played in implementing the Berlin Electron Synchrotron (BESSY I and II). Current research at the Institute in surface science and catalysis as well as molecular physics and spectroscopy is exemplified in this issue [Angew. Chem. 2011, 123, 10242; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 10064].

Marie Sklodowska-Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize twice in different scientific disciplines, is an inspiring figure. She discovered two new elements, polonium and radium, and was appointed as the first female professor at the University of Paris, when in most countries women did not yet have the right to vote. She serves as a role model for scholarly and humanitarian endeavors through what she attained in science, and through the hardships she had to overcome and the gender discrimination barriers faced by women scientists of that period, which she had to break. This article is a tribute to Marie Sklodowska-Curie's achievements.

and a pioneer in organosulfur and organozinc chemistry. Zaitsev held the Chair of Chemistry at Kazan for 39 years, and in that time was responsible for the training of some of the most eminent organic chemists of the next generation, among them Egor Egorevich Vagner (Georg Wagner, 1849– 1903), Sergei Nikolaevich Reformatskii (1860–1934), and Aleksandr Erminingel dovich Arbuzov (1877–1968). In addition, he served two terms as the President of the Russian Physical-Chemical Society, and he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Today, Kazan is the capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan. It is located approximately 750 km east of Moscow on the Volga River, and is a city of approximately 1.2 million that is a major scientific and economic hub. In 1804, when the university there was founded, the population of Kazan was just over 40000; during Zaitsev s career, the population more than tripled from just over 60000 to more than 200000. Zaitsev was born to Mikhail Savvich Zaitsev and his second wife, Nataliya Vasil evna Lyapunova, the sister of the astronomer Mikhail Vasil evich Lyapunov (1820–1868), who also served as Professor of Astronomy at Kazan University. Zaitsev s family had lived in the Kazan district since the time of Ivan the Terrible, and held a prominent place in the trading guilds (his grandfather, Savva Stepanovich Zaitsev had been an elder in the cathedral, and was one of the group directing the cathedral renovation during 1824–1825). Mikhail Zaitsev had determined that his son should follow him into the guilds, so when the time came for young Aleksandr to complete his education, it was only at the urging of his uncle that his father permitted him to enter the university, and then only so long as Aleksandr entered the Judicial-Economics faculty as a cameralist. It was Lyapunov who taught young Zaitsev the Latin he needed to enter the university. As his father wished, Zaitsev entered Kazan University as a cameralist. The cameralisty were students in training to become government bureaucrats, and at the time that Zaitsev entered Kazan University, all cameralisty were required to study chemistry for two years. It was during these studies that he encountered one of the most influential Russian organic chemists of the nineteenth century: Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov (1828–1886; Figure 2). At the time, Butlerov was Professor of Chemistry at Kazan. He had studied chemistry under Nikolai Nikolaevich Zinin (1812–1880), the discoverer of the reduction of nitrobenzene to aniline, and Karl Karlovich Klaus (1796–1864), the discoverer of ruthenium, but he had written his kandidat dissertation in entomology. However, to meet the needs of the university, he was seconded to teaching chemistry, like his mentor, Zinin. He first became Klaus assistant in chemistry and, after Klaus left for Dorpat, he assumed all instruction in chemistry. His Magistr Khimii (M. Chem.) dissertation was largely a review of the literature, although it did contain the first report of the oxidation of alkenes with osmium tetroxide. His dissertation for the degree of Doktor Khimii (Dr. Chem.), which was necessary before he could assume the Chair in Chemistry, was also largely a historical review. It is worthwhile noting that the faculty at Kazan did not approve Butlerov s dissertation for the degree of Dr. Chem., so he Figure 1. Aleksandr Mikhailovich Zaitsev late in his career (estimated after 1900).

Certainly a highlight in the career of Nobel Laureate Professor Robert Burns Woodward (1917–1979) was the foundation of the Woodward Research Institute (WRI) at Ciba AG in Basel, Switzerland, in 1963. Woodward's remarkable accomplishments in the development of organic chemistry altered not only our concepts of molecular structure, but also our comprehension of physico-chemical properties. In his legacy, Woodward devised innovative strategies for natural product syntheses based on brilliant rationale of their properties and an uncanny sense of Nature. The chemistry community benefited not only at Harvard but especially in Basel and Zurich from Woodward's inspiring lectures and the opportunity to learn from the chemistry Meister. This article highlights parts of the chemistry and some personalities that contributed to forefront investigations at the Woodward Research Institute which began at the former Novartis legacy company, Ciba AG, Basel.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, on November 11th, 1867, the German Chemical Society of Berlin held its inaugural meeting. The main purpose of the Society was to unite pure and applied chemistry and to foster cooperation between academic research and the chemical industry. And, indeed, it soon became the major forum of German and even European chemistry. Its program clearly bears the hallmark of a single individual: August Wilhelm Hofmann, the Society's first president, who died 100 years ago. For his contemporaries, Hofmann represented a new type of chemistry professor. At no time since have professional chemists felt as abundantly endowed with potential for the future and with public esteem. Hofmann's portrait was monumental even then, and still today it would belong in any gallery devoted to our distinguished forebears. Anniversaries provide an opportunity to direct our attention toward the past—and thus to ourselves as well. We are, after all, heirs to that period from which the modern world derives its profile. Questions from our own time lead us to reacquaint ourselves with one of the founders of modern chemistry, but we may also benefit from a fresh look at an epoch which, beneath the surface of prosperity and progress, was as contradictory as our own, an epoch struggling to understand the role of science in the new industrial era.