Advances in Stereo-Chemistry

Abstract

THE sixth Messel Memorial Lecture was delivered before members of the Society of Chemical Industry at Nottingham on July 14 by Sir William Pope. Reviewing “Forty Years of Stereo-Chemistry”? Sir William Pope traced the important developments of the present century in this branch of organic chemistry, which about 1890 was comparatively dormant, and had largely remained so since the work of Pasteur, van't Hoff, and Le Bel. Develop ment recommenced with the introduction of an improved technique for the resolution of synthetic mixtures or racemic compounds which followed from the discovery of the sulphonic acids of camphor and their halogen derivatives. The further demonstration that optical activity may be associated with the presence in the molecule of asymmetric atoms of other elements such as sulphur, tin, silicon, phosphorus, as well as the verification among ethylene derivatives of van‘t Hoff's prediction of the optical activity of allene derivatives of the type abC:C:Ccd, led chemists generally to realise that the chemical molecule is spread out in three-dimensional space, and prompted subsequent attempts to ascertain the way in which the properties of compounds are influenced by the shape of the molecules.