William Theilheimer who was born in Augsburg

Augsburg

Augsburg is a city in the south-west of Bavaria, Germany. It is a university town and home of the Regierungsbezirk Schwaben and the Bezirk Schwaben. Augsburg is an urban district and home to the institutions of the Landkreis Augsburg. It is, as of 2008, the third-largest city in Bavaria with a...

, Germany, played a significant role in the history of what is now known as chemoinformatics.

He received his Ph.D in organic chemistry from Basel University, Switzerland in 1940. Being Jewish, Basel provided a safe haven for him during the Second World War and he stayed there until 1947 as Assistant to Professor Hans Friedrich Albrecht Erlenmeyer (1900 - 1967), the son of Friedrich Gustav Carl Emil Erlenmeyer

Friedrich Gustav Carl Emil Erlenmeyer

Friedrich Gustav Carl Emil Erlenmeyer was a German chemist and the discoverer of the Erlenmeyer-Plöchl azlactone and amino acid synthesis. He was the son of Richard August Carl Emil Erlenmeyer....

 (Emil Jr.) and grandson of Richard August Carl Emil Erlenmeyer

Richard August Carl Emil Erlenmeyer

Richard August Carl Emil Erlenmeyer or Emil Erlenmeyer was a German chemist known for formulating the Erlenmeyer Ruleand designing a type of chemical flask.-Biography:...

 (Emil Sr.). During his time there he compiled the data for the first two volumes of "Synthetische Methoden der Organische Chemie" published by S. Karger Verlag in Basel in 1946 and 1948. These built on the system of Conrad Weygand

Conrad Weygand

Conrad Weygand was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Leipzig. In 1938 he put forward a method for the classification of chemical reactions based on bond breakage and formation during the reaction...

 (Organic Preparations, Interscience Publishers, Inc., New York, 1945) for grouping similar reactions together, but used "Theilheimer reaction symbols" that summarised the most significant bond formed, the reaction type (addition reaction

Addition reaction

An addition reaction, in organic chemistry, is in its simplest terms an organic reaction where two or more molecules combine to form a larger one....

, rearrangement reaction

Rearrangement reaction

A rearrangement reaction is a broad class of organic reactions where the carbon skeleton of a molecule is rearranged to give a structural isomer of the original molecule. Often a substituent moves from one atom to another atom in the same molecule...

, exchange reaction/substitution reaction

Substitution reaction

In a substitution reaction, a functional group in a particular chemical compound is replaced by another group. In organic chemistry, the electrophilic and nucleophilic substitution reactions are of prime importance...

 or elimination reaction

Elimination reaction

An elimination reaction is a type of organic reaction in which two substituents are removed from a molecule in either a one or two-step mechanism...

), and the bond broken or fragment lost, as well as a specific reagent order based on the periodic table

Periodic table

The periodic table of the chemical elements is a tabular display of the 118 known chemical elements organized by selected properties of their atomic structures. Elements are presented by increasing atomic number, the number of protons in an atom's atomic nucleus...

.

Later volumes were sponsored by a number of American chemical and pharmaceutical firms, most notably Hoffmann-LaRoche, Inc., who provided library facilities at their site in Nutley, New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

 from 1948 up to (and after) Theilheimer's retirement in 1981.

His books were developed as modern chemical reaction

Chemical reaction

A chemical reaction is a process that leads to the transformation of one set of chemical substances to another. Chemical reactions can be either spontaneous, requiring no input of energy, or non-spontaneous, typically following the input of some type of energy, such as heat, light or electricity...

 databases in the 1980s by MDL (Molecular Design Limited) and ORAC (Organic Reactions Accessed by Computer); both of these companies were taken over by Robert Maxwell

Robert Maxwell

Ian Robert Maxwell MC was a Czechoslovakian-born British media proprietor and former Member of Parliament , who rose from poverty to build an extensive publishing empire...

's Maxwell Communications Corporation

Maxwell Communications Corporation

Maxwell Communications Corporation plc was a leading British media business. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.-History:...

.

Dr. Theilheimer received the Herman Skolnik Award of the ACS Division of Chemical Information in 1987.