The Role of Physical Instrumentation in Structural Organic Chemistry

Remarkably, the emergence of, and the present-day reliance upon, instrumental methods, has received little attention from historians, although it spans the history and sociology of science, the history of technology and even business history. The vastness, diversity and complexity of both the science and the technology of these developments explain the dearth of any significant historical literature. Furthermore, the displacement of classical methods by physical instrumentation was completed only in the last two decades. The story involves instrument manufacturers, chemists, physicists, government agencies and the chemical industry. Here, we will delineate the impact of instrumentation on the determination of the structures of organic compounds by focusing on the natural products that are the lifeblood of organic chemistry and the mainstays of the biomedical sciences.