Sachse Follow-Up

From WikidChem

Sachse_follow-up Slide 20

Slide 20 shows a portion of Sachse's paper after Baeyer's response. Sachse had originally claimed that the 6 membered carbon ring, cyclohexane, need not have strained bonds since not all the carbons had to lie on the same plane. In this paper, Sachse has moved out of the realm of organic chemistry into physical chemistry. Ostwald, the editor of the journal in which Sachse published this paper, mocks other organic chemists' neglect of everything but stereochemistry. Ostwald was a founder of physical chemistry, which was for the most part concerned with energy. The mathematical format that Sachse chose for this paper was more likely to appeal to a physical chemist like Ostwald than to organic chemists, who were the natural audience for this subject.

Slide 21

Sachse then wrote one more paper in a physical chemistry journal again incorporating formulas (which were foreign to most organic chemists) and this time geometry as well. He then died at the age of 31. More than a decade later in 1905, Baeyer remarked that it appeared that Sachse's mathematical formulas indicating an "unstrained" cyclohexane was correct, but experimentally Baeyer's planar model seemed accurate.