114: We Can Work It Out

The History of Chemistry

Here we talk of the first real molecular machines of the 1990s, and the chemistry advances required to invent them. We define what such a machine is, and reach back into organic chemistry of the 1940s and 1950s for "conformational analysis." We recall the Bell Labs chemists Harry Frisch and Edel Wasserman, and their foundation of chemical topology. Gottfried Schill, Arthur Lüttringhaus, plus Ian and Shuyen Harrison, synthesized interesting mechanical compounds. Through the 1970s and 1980s, chemists continued to advance molecular components of machines, and by the 1990s, the first true molecular machines (aside from existing biomolecules) were created.

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