Foundation of nitrogen stereochemistry: Alfred Werner's inaugural dissertation

Abstract

Reviews Alfred Werner's inaugural dissertation on the one hundredth anniversary of his winning of the first Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Alfred Werner: Overlooked Genius of the Periodic System

“…Werner's life, work and achievements are thoroughly documented in George B. Kauffman's monograph that came out in 1966 and was dedicated to his 100th anniversary . Despite being first and foremost unquestionably regarded as the father of coordination chemistry, Alfred Werner is also widely praised for having influenced numerous other fields of chemistry, including inorganic, organometallic, stereo‐, and bioinorganic chemistry, in which knowledge of the preferred coordination environment of specific metal ions is applied to the active sites of enzymes. Werner's findings are also mentioned to have influenced research directed towards metal‐catalyzed synthesis of organic molecules and pharmaceuticals, inorganic polymers and metal‐organic frameworks, to name but a few.…”

“…The legacy of Alfred Werner,t he father of coordination chemistry,i st ot he presentday highly revered by chemists workingi n variousf ields. Many articles have been dedicatedt oh is crucial contribution to chemistry, the one path he is regarded to have ever seriously considered, [1] on the occasions of the centennial of either his birth [2][3][4] or Nobel Prize award. [5][6][7][8] Alfred Werner was born on December 12th, 1866 in Mülhausen, Alsace.…”

Spontaneously resolving chiral cis-[dinitrobis(ethylenediamine)cobalt]X complexes (X=Cl, Br) from the Alfred Werner collection of original samples at the University of Zurich – Alfred Werner's missed opportunity to become the ‘Louis Pasteur’ of coordination compounds

“…It was Alfred Werner's privilege to discover the three-dimensional views in coordination chemistry, which enabled him to conclude on the existence of chirality, which happened in the last decade of the 19th century. Alfred Werner was well trained in organic stereochemistry mainly through his PhD supervisor Arthur Hantzsch at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland (Hantzsch & Werner, 1890;Kauffman, 1966aKauffman, , 1966b. His switch to the field of coordination chemistry had started already in the group of Arthur Hantzsch, but developed independently further when he eventually had moved to the University of Zurich as an associate professor in 1893 and he had then formulated and published his Coordination Theory (Bailar, 1971;Berke, 2009;Gade, 2002;Kauffman, 1966aKauffman, , 1966bKauffman, , 1979Pfeiffer & Werner, 1928).…”

Conformational isomerism of trans-[Pt(NH2C6H11)2I2] and the classical Wernerian chemistry of [Pt(NH2C6H11)4]X2 (X=Cl, Br, I)

“…Indeed, it was as a result of “his work on the linkage of atoms in molecules, by which he has thrown fresh light on old problems and opened new fields of research, particularly in inorganic chemistry” that the Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien awarded him the Nobel Prize in 1913 [2]. Given the magnitude of his impact on the field of inorganic chemistry, it is easy to overlook the fact that Werner was initially trained as an organic chemist, and his early work on the stereochemistry of nitrogen centers presaged his later foray into inorganic stereochemistry [3, 4]. The spatial arrangement of atoms featured prominently in Werner’s work, and it was by the preparation of isomeric, particularly stereoisomeric, species that he firmly established his coordination theory [5].…”