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Derek Harold Richard Barton —
British
Scientist
born on September 08, 1918,
died on March 16, 1998
Sir Derek Harold Richard Barton PhD FRS FRSE was an English organic chemist and Nobel Prize laureate for 1969... (wikipedia)
The first serious applications were in triterpenoid chemistry.
X-Ray crystallography is nowadays an accurate and rapid method of determining conformation in the crystal lattice, which conformation usually corresponds to the preferred conformation in solution.
Every chemical reaction has a transition state.
Many transition states have a well-defined preferred geometrical requirement.
It does not seem, however, that organic chemists were much worried about barriers to rotation in organic molecules in general at that time because there was no technique available to demonstrate the phenomenon experimentally.