Most everybody knows - or at least most everybody reading this abstract knows - that in 1848 Louis Pasteur correlated macroscopic chirality, the shapes of enanitomorphous crystals, with microscopic chirality, the action of the individual molecules on circularly polarized light. The latter step required the dissolution of his hard won crystals. Pasteur published several papers in crystallography before his famous discovery that is the typical starting point for accounts of his chemistry. Here is reviewed the state of the science of crystallography in the middle of the 19th C., how Pasteur went about his goniometry before and during his work on the tartrates, and why he had to dissolve his crystals in order to detect circular birefringence, a necessity that is still resonant today.

Why did Pasteur dissolve his crystals?

256th National Meeting (2018)

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