The Story of the Hugh Hefner of Chemistry

Chances are, you’re not like me: you cringe when someone says the word “chemistry.” Your memory of it vaguely harkens back to an undergrad class whose knowledge you flushed once you finished the final. That’s okay — my goal for this series is to change that paradigm, make it understandable to all, and provide some entertainment.

When I think of Hugh Hefner, I think of the prototypical playboy — smoking jacket, lavish parties, and the man to be seen with. I’m also choosing to skip over some of his negative qualities for the sake of analogy. The individual I’ve alluded to for quite some time now exhibited many of those same playboy characteristics, but with the key difference of doing it all in the name of advancing and promoting the scientific discipline of chemistry.

Chemistry had just dug out of the dark ages — it was becoming common knowledge that the world was not composed of four elements as was the belief for some 2000 years. Practicing chemists were starting to marry their empirical knowledge with theory, which also hadn’t been the case for quite some time. There was a crap-ton of scientific data and crap-ton of theory to go with it: remember, phlogiston was a thing and it was basically the last remnant of the four element theory. Also, scientific communication was difficult as discussion of findings was largely limited to hyper-elite clubs, so disputes ranged from the validity of data to the names of elements. Someone needed to pull everything together, to build a naming system for chemicals and elements…