The year is 1985. Windows 1.0 has just been released in North America, and the first Back to the Future film is playing in cinemas. Chemists worldwide who need to draw chemical structures have no choice but to use a combination of freehand drawing, stencils, and dry-transfer letter decals. However, a former high school science teacher, a Harvard PhD student and a chemistry professor are about to revolutionise how chemists depict molecules.
The chemistry professor is David Evans, a prominent organic chemist who moved to Harvard from Caltech in 1983. Sally Evans, a high school teacher, moves with him and becomes his research group’s administrator, laboratory architect, and graphic designer. The latter involves drawing the countless chemical structures the group are working on, a time-consuming task often requiring the repeated drawing of complex structures for reaction schemes.
In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh computer and David and Sally Evans purchased one in 1985. Tiring of producing structures by hand, the Evanses wondered if the Macintosh program MacDraw could be a starting point for a chemical drawing program. They enlisted Harvard PhD student Stewart Rubenstein, whose thesis required hundreds of chemical structures, to collaborate on creating such a program: ChemDraw.
Progress was rapid, and after a few weeks, Rubenstein had created a rudimentary program. On 17 July 1985, he and the Evanses presented a hands-on demonstration of the ChemDraw program at the Gordon Conference on Reactions and Processes. The response from the attending chemists was one of huge enthusiasm. Less than a year later, Cambridge Scientific Computing (later CambridgeSoft) was formed to market and sell ChemDraw, and the rest is chemical drawing history. It’s no exaggeration to say that ChemDraw fundamentally changed how chemists depict chemical structures.
Today, ChemDraw is owned by Revvity Signals, who commissioned me to create the timeline graphic in this article, looking at the software’s history from 1985 to the present day. Those of you who’ve been following my Compound Interest graphics since I started making them back in 2013 will know that chemical structures feature heavily in many of them. ChemDraw has been instrumental in producing these structures and has doubtless saved me hours of painstaking drawing!
Together with the team at Revvity Signals we wondered if we could quantify just how many hours of time ChemDraw has saved for chemists over the years. This led to the graphic below, which highlights some key statistics relating to ChemDraw. This required some fairly broad assumptions about the number of structures drawn, their size, and the time taken to draw them, so the figures should be read with that in mind. We landed on a figure of a whopping 350 million hours saved by ChemDraw since its release. Based on some even broader assumptions about the average size of the molecules drawn in ChemDraw, if we printed out all the molecular drawings ever produced in ChemDraw, they could circle the Earth almost three times if placed end to end.
Dave Evans died in 2022. He was survived by Sally, who eventually went back to teaching after the development of ChemDraw. Stewart Rubenstein retired from CambridgeSoft in 2006 and these days can be found playing tournament bridge.
For a much fuller account of the history of ChemDraw’s development, you can read it in Dave Evans’ own words here, or in this C&EN article on the occasion of ChemDraw’s thirtieth anniversary.
