The Many Chemists Who Could Have Proposed the Woodward-Hoffmann Rules But Didn't: The Organic Chemists Who Knew of the Smoking Guns**

Abstract

It is a reasonable question to ask, why, as of 1965 when the five Woodward-Hoffmann communications appeared, did no other organic chemist discover the orbital symmetry rules for pericyclic reactions? The previous two papers in this 27-paper series on the history of the Woodward-Hoffmann rules discussed the physical chemists, chemical physicists, and theoretical chemists who could have solved the pericyclic no-mechanism problem; and the organic chemists in whose laboratory many of the key hints to this problem were found but still did not solve the problem. The stories of 16 other chemists who knew of (at least portions of) the pericyclic no-mechanism problem are presented in this paper. Social, political, and scientific explanations are presented as partial rationalizations as to why none of these individuals – except Woodward with Hoffmann – solved the pericyclic no-mechanism problem.