Loschmidt’s Achievements and Shortcomings in Elucidating the Structure of Organic Molecules

Abstract

As part of her final examination in a Vienna secondary school (BORG III), the above author, RSM, wrote her “Fachbereichsarbeit” (project work) entitled “Johann Joseph Loschmidt — Sein Leben und seine Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der Chemie” (Johann Joseph Loschmidt — His Life and His Achievements in Chemistry)¹. A major part of this paper was an evaluation of Loschmidt’s booklet “Chemische Studien I—Constitutions-formeln der organischen Chemie in graphischer Darstellung”² and the comparison of his formulae with those used today. The poster subsequently prepared for display at the Loschmidt-Symposium presented a few examples selected from Loschmidt’s formulae, demonstrating that Loschmidt had found the correct chemical structure of many rather complicated organic molecules, but that he was in error when predicting the structures of some classes of compounds.