ABSTRACT
After finishing my doctoral thesis, I had the feeling that I was a performer without an audience when it came to my scientific work. Both Hans Primas and I had reached the limits of our work and we were still ultimately able to present a coherent theoretical concept for our experiments. The only problem was that none of this seemed to make any actual impact. We weren’t able to provide chemists with a way to produce better NMR spectrums and quantum physicists had no interest in our work. Primus and his staff at ETH had built their own NMR spectrometer that could be used to carry out simple chemical analyses, something I had helped optimize. At the time, the devices were even produced commercially by Zurich electrical engineering company Trüb, Täuber & Co. AG and sold to various research institutes and chemical companies throughout Europe. However, the devices simply weren’t able to make any use of my theoretical work. What’s more, the Californian company Varian Associates had since brought a product to the global market – the legendary A-60 spectrometer – which had helped establish the use of NMR as one of the most important chemical analysis processes in chemistry labs around the world.
