Historical Background
In 1890, Hermann Sachse, a 28-year-old assistant in Berlin, published instructions for folding a piece of paper to represent two forms of cyclohexane he called symmetrical and unsymmetrical (what we would now call chair and boat). He clearly understood that these forms had two positions for the hydrogens (again, to use modern terminology, axial and equatorial), that two chairs would probably interconvert, and even how certain substituents might favor one of the chair forms. Because he expressed all this in mathematical language, few chemists of the time understood his arguments. He had several attempts at publishing these ideas, but none succeeded in capturing the imagination of chemists. His death in 1893 at the age of 31 meant his ideas sank into obscurity. It was only in 1918 when Ernst Mohr, using the then very new technique of x-ray crystallography, was able to determine the molecular structure of diamond, that it became recognised that Sachse's chair was the pivotal motif.
Derek Barton and Odd Hassel shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for work on the conformations of cyclohexane and various other molecules.
Read more about this topic: Cyclohexane Conformation
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