text: Experimentally the first examples of mechanically interlocked molecular architectures appeared in the 1960s with catenanes being synthesized by Wasserman and Schill and rotaxanes by Harrison and Harrison. The chemistry of MIMAs came of age when Sauvage pioneered their synthesis using templating methods. In the early 1990s the usefulness and even the existence of MIMAs were challenged. The latter concern was addressed by X ray crystallographer and structural chemist David Williams. Two postdoctoral researchers who took on the challenge of producing [5]catenane (olympiadane) pushed the boundaries of the complexity of MIMAs that could be synthesized their success was confirmed in 1996 by a solid‐state structure analysis conducted by David Williams.