PMID: 11625121Jan 1, 1997Paper

Are liquid crystals living organisms?

Gewina
H A Snelders

Abstract

In 1888 the Austrian botanist F. Reinitzer made the observation that the solid compound cholesteryl-benzoate changes - when melting at 145.5 oC - into a cloudy liquid, that however, turns into a clear liquid at 178.5 oC and higher temperatures. The cloudy liquid seemed to be doubly refracting. Soon a number of these so-called 'liquid crystals' were discovered; in 1908 D. Vorländer, professor of organic chemistry at Halle, described more than 250 of these substances. It was O. Lehmann, professor of physics at Aachen (1885), Dresden (1888) and Karlsruhe (1889), who immediately after Reinitzer's observation began a systematic study of these liquid crystals. In The Netherlands the Amsterdam professor of physican chemistry H. W. Bakhuis Roozeboom was interested in liquid crystals, in particular because of their place in his phase system. F.M. Jaeger, at that time teaching chemistry in a secondary school in Zaandam (near Amsterdam) and working as an unpaid university lecturer at the Amsterdam university (by recommendation of Bakhuis Roozeboom), investigated liquid crystals (1906), as did a number of doctoral students (A.C. de Kock, 1903; A. Prins, 1907). At the university of Utrecht L.S. Ornstein, professor of physics, gave the study...Continue Reading

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