A Brill Calendar: August 30

Few discoveries are as fundamental as the one of Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff (Rotterdam, August 30 1852 – Berlin, March 1 1911); made when he was 22, after quick studies at Leyden, Bonn and Paris.

In “Chambers Concise Dictionary of Scientists” (Cambridge, 1989) four scholars surnamed ‘Millar’ – David, Ian, John and Margaret – explain its importance concisely.

“He published a paper which founded stereochemistry. It had been known since Biot’s work that many organic compounds are optically active. Pasteur had been able to relate this property, for crystalline solids, to the dyssymetry of the crystals; but interest in the organic compounds was on their optical activity in solution. Van ‘t Hoff took up an idea of Kekulé’s (1867) that the four groups usually linked to a carbon atom can be expected to be equally distributed in the space around it […] Van ‘t Hoff saw that if the four groups are all different from each other, they can be arranged about the carbon atom in two ways; and these two variants of a molecule are non-superimposable mirror images of each other […] He proposed that one form would rotate polarized light to the left, and the other form to the right. On this basis a general theory of molecular shapes could be developed.”

The insight earned Van ‘t Hoff (some 27 years later) the first Nobel Prize in chemistry. And CH4, natural methane-gas, has been the chief economic resource of The Netherlands during the past fifty years; and probably in fifty years to come.