William Joseph Wiswesser

Life

1914-1989

A detailed memoir and obituary appears at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ci00065a001

Relevant Employment

• U.S. Army
• Ray-o-Vac

Contributions

Wiswesser was editor of Chemical World Index Key News. He was interested in visual-aid education, chemical coding, Wiswesser line-formula notation, dimensional analysis, atomic theory, and toxicology correlations. He etablished the Chemical Notation Association (1954or55). He worked at: Research chemist, Hercules Powder Co. 1936-39; Assistant research director, Trojan Powder Co. 1939-42; Chemical engineer, Cooper Union 1942-45; Head of department of chemical research, Ray-O-Vac 1945-63; Research chemist, US Army, Fort Detrich 1963-?.

He designed a linear notation system which the ISI adopted to use in some of their products (1968) and still use today, and it was also adopted for internal use by many pharmaceutical companies the best tool to get at chemical structure and to represent it and print it in its day (mid 60s to 80s).

A brief note about Wiswesser Line Notation System appears in Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiswesser_line_notation

Awards

• Skolnik Award (ACS) 1980 for pioneering mathematical, physical, and chemical methods of punched-card and computer-stored representation of molecular structures, leading to the creation of the Wiswesser Line Notation (WLN) for concise storage and retrieval of chemical structures; WLN was adopted by the largest chemical and pharmaceutical companies worldwide to manage their chemical structure files, and by many secondary indexes, atlases of data, and catalogs of chemical compounds.

Papers

LOCATION #1 Lehigh University Libraries, Mart Science and Engineering Library, Bethlehem, PA 18015

• Papers dates:
• Size:
• Includes:
  • The Wiswesser Line Notation (Chemistry)
  • Manuscripts
  • Papers of Dr. Wiswesser on his system for encoding chemical compounds
• Finding aid:
• Source: Subject Collections, 7th ed. Volume 2 M-Z