Discovery
The word "cellulose" was coined just 37 years before the American Chemical Society was formed. It appeared first in 1839 in the French Academy's assessment on Anselme Payen's research on "ligneous matter," the then-current term for the combination of lignin and cellulose that forms the woody cell walls of trees and other plants. In 1838 Payen reported that ligneous matter, then considered a single substance, contained two chemically distinct materials. One of these, the French chemist declared, had the same chemical composition as starch, but differed in structure and properties. Whether Payen himself named this substance "cellulose" is uncertain.
Structure
In 1922, when the ACS Division of Cellulose Chemistry was formed, fundamental research on cellulose was just entering the highly productive era that has continued to this day. A major step came in 1920 with the discovery that celluloses in delignified wood pulp, flax, ramie, and cotton showed practically the same x-ray pattern. Such studies would do much eventually to clarify the structure of cellulose, the mechanical properties of fibers, and the physical basis for the fiber-forming properties of polymeric systems. A second major step was the "primary-valence chain" theory of cellulose polymers. Tollens in 1895 and Nastukoff in 1900 recognized that cellulose is a linear polymer of glucose, but their contemporaries favored more ambiguous associations of glucose. The pieces started to fall into place when the x-ray work of Polanyi provided a unit cell that would accommodate four glucose residues. There could either be two disaccharide segments of long cellulose chains or two cyclic disaccharide molecules. It was only after it was learned that the dominant form of glucose was a six-membered ring instead of a five-membered ring that the chemical structure became fully apparent. Putting together these ideas was the work of a number of chemists, including Nobelists Walter Haworth in England and Hermann Staudinger in Germany; it led to the widespread agreement that cellulose is a linear polymer of glucose. In the same period, K. H. Meyer and Herman Mark in Germany determined the dimensions of the modern unit cell of cellulose. Their interpretation of the x-ray information led, in the early 1930s, to the formulation of the modern fibrillar theory of fiber structure. The concepts of polymer structure and behavior that originated in studies on cellulose have since played a critical role in the development of synthetic polymers.
The issue of the orientation of the cellulose chains was discussed in papers by Meyer and Mark (1928) and Meyer and Misch (1937). This important question was considered to be solved through intuition because of the transformation of the crystal structure that occurs during mercerization. Rayon, which is created from dissolved cellulose, and mercerized cellulose, which is created from native cellulose in the solid state, give apparently identical x-ray diffraction patterns. It was felt that the rayon structure would most likely be composed of antiparallel chains. Since the mercerized structure was apparently the same as the rayon structure and since the mercerized structure could be obtained from the native material by a solid state treatment, it was concluded that all structures were antiparallel. This has some serious consequences for understanding the biosynthesis of cellulose.
The word "cellulose" was coined just 37 years before the American Chemical Society was formed. It appeared first in 1839 in the French Academy's assessment on Anselme Payen's research on "ligneous matter," the then-current term for the combination of lignin and cellulose that forms the woody cell walls of trees and other plants. In 1838 Payen reported that ligneous matter, then considered a single substance, contained two chemically distinct materials. One of these, the French chemist declared, had the same chemical composition as starch, but differed in structure and properties. Whether Payen himself named this substance "cellulose" is uncertain.
Structure
In 1922, when the ACS Division of Cellulose Chemistry was formed, fundamental research on cellulose was just entering the highly productive era that has continued to this day. A major step came in 1920 with the discovery that celluloses in delignified wood pulp, flax, ramie, and cotton showed practically the same x-ray pattern. Such studies would do much eventually to clarify the structure of cellulose, the mechanical properties of fibers, and the physical basis for the fiber-forming properties of polymeric systems. A second major step was the "primary-valence chain" theory of cellulose polymers. Tollens in 1895 and Nastukoff in 1900 recognized that cellulose is a linear polymer of glucose, but their contemporaries favored more ambiguous associations of glucose. The pieces started to fall into place when the x-ray work of Polanyi provided a unit cell that would accommodate four glucose residues. There could either be two disaccharide segments of long cellulose chains or two cyclic disaccharide molecules. It was only after it was learned that the dominant form of glucose was a six-membered ring instead of a five-membered ring that the chemical structure became fully apparent. Putting together these ideas was the work of a number of chemists, including Nobelists Walter Haworth in England and Hermann Staudinger in Germany; it led to the widespread agreement that cellulose is a linear polymer of glucose. In the same period, K. H. Meyer and Herman Mark in Germany determined the dimensions of the modern unit cell of cellulose. Their interpretation of the x-ray information led, in the early 1930s, to the formulation of the modern fibrillar theory of fiber structure. The concepts of polymer structure and behavior that originated in studies on cellulose have since played a critical role in the development of synthetic polymers.
The issue of the orientation of the cellulose chains was discussed in papers by Meyer and Mark (1928) and Meyer and Misch (1937). This important question was considered to be solved through intuition because of the transformation of the crystal structure that occurs during mercerization. Rayon, which is created from dissolved cellulose, and mercerized cellulose, which is created from native cellulose in the solid state, give apparently identical x-ray diffraction patterns. It was felt that the rayon structure would most likely be composed of antiparallel chains. Since the mercerized structure was apparently the same as the rayon structure and since the mercerized structure could be obtained from the native material by a solid state treatment, it was concluded that all structures were antiparallel. This has some serious consequences for understanding the biosynthesis of cellulose.