Beilstein's Handbook

Fedor Fedorovich (Friedrich Konrad) Beilstein.

Back in Göttingen, Beilstein began to collect systematic information about all organic compounds known at that time, which ultimately made him the founder and first editor of the multivolume Handbook of Organic Chemistry ( Handbuch der organischen Chemie ). According to Beilstein himself, the preparatory work for the first edition took 17 years ^[1] .

The first edition of the manual in German, prepared by Beilstein alone when he was a professor at the Petersburg Institute of Technology, appeared in Leipzig in 1881 in two volumes: on 2,200 pages it contained information about 1,500 compounds. Beilstein's handbook was highly appreciated by chemists both in Russia and in Western Europe, becoming a handbook for every chemist.

To get an idea of ​​the enormity of labor, it is enough to point out that F. F. spent the entire first edition completely without assistance, with all the corrections and a pointer, except for the general supervision of the printing of prof. Arendt in Leipzig.

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The second edition, which began to be published in 1886, included three volumes of a larger size than the first. The third edition was launched in 1893 in the form of four bulky volumes (74 thousand organic compounds on 6844 pages). It was completed in 1899, and later supplemented by five volumes of applications prepared by the editors of the German Chemical Society (ed. Paul Jacobson), to whom Beilstein bequeathed his copyrights and transferred all the additions to the directory that he had collected by 1897.

In the preface to the third edition, F.F. says that the knowledge that he laid the foundation for this kind of composition and passed it into reliable hands is the best reward of his almost 40 years of work, and will serve as a source of full satisfaction until the end of his days.

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All 3 editions appear in the Leopold Foss publishing house (Leipzig, Hamburg).

The handbook continued to be published after the death of Beilstein; subsequently, for its publication in Frankfurt in 1951, the Max Planck Society created a special “Beilstein Institute for the Literature of Organic Chemistry”. In 1999, the institute was renamed the "Beilstein Institute to Promote the Development of Chemical Sciences."

The last, fourth, edition of the directory, published from 1918 to 1998, includes 503 volumes (more than 440 thousand pages). The handbook consists of the main series (31 volumes, 1918-1940), including information on 144 thousand compounds and covering literature on 1910, and six additional ones. Since 1985, starting with the fifth additional series, the handbook began to be printed in English.

At present, the reference book is an electronic database ( Beilstein database ) containing a description of over 10 million structures and about 11 million chemical reactions. Since 2009, electronic content has been promoted by Elsevier under the trade name Reaxys ^[2] . In colloquial speech, the directory is simply called "Beilstein."

The directory contains descriptions of all organic compounds that are obtained sufficiently pure and whose structure is known (each compound has a serial number and is called a registrant ). Following the name are given: the total (empirical) and structural formulas, the pathways of the formation of a substance and its chemical transformations under the action of physical agents (heat, light, electricity), and then inorganic and organic reagents; evidence is accompanied by links to the original literature. The search for the desired compound can be carried out using the formula and subject indexes or a systematic scheme ^[3] .

• Beilstein’s handbook becomes the key to solving the crime in Isaac Asimov ’s American science fiction writer and science popularizer, “What's in a Name?”

• Potapov V.M. , Kochetova E.K. Chemical Information. Where and how to search for the necessary information for the chemist. - M .: Chemistry, 1988 .-- 224 p.