Coblentz’s infrared spectrometer and the overlooked power of vibrations

Sitting through a morning of seminars by candidates on the shortlist for a lectureship, several of us were struck by how profoundly chemistry has changed over our lifetime: the sheer volume of data that is pouring out of the myriad instrumental techniques available in our labs. In chemistry there is now a real hunger to adopt new techniques that will probe ever subtler aspects of matter. It is a far cry from the early days when anything other than optical spectroscopy struggled to make headway among chemists, vibrational spectroscopy being a case in point.