"the most brilliant analysis ever done on a structural puzzle was surely the solution (1953) of the terramycin problem. it was a problem of great industrial importance, and hence many able chemists had performed an enormous amount of work trying to determine the structure. there seemed to be too much data to resolve the problem, because a significant number of observations, although experimentally correct, were very misleading. woodward took a large piece of cardboard, wrote on it all the facts and, by thought alone, deduced the correct structure for terramycin. nobody else could have done that at the time."