Unknown (Mondadori Publishers) · Public domain

Otto Wallach won the 1910 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for bringing order to a field that had none: the alicyclic compounds found in essential oils, terpenes whose structures chemists had struggled to classify before his systematic work at the University of Göttingen. His research gave the perfume and fragrance industry, until then working largely by trial and error, a chemical basis for identifying and synthesizing scent compounds.