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“Chemistry in Space” and the Complex Atom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

W. V. Farrar
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Synopsis

The rise of stereochemistry in the 1880s stimulated a few organic chemists to speculate about the complexity of atoms.

Type
Notes and Communications
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , June 1968 , pp. 65 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1968

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References

1 Pasteur, L., Comptes rend., lxxviii (1874), 1517.Google Scholar

2 This paper is to be regarded as an addendum to the much longer one already published (Farrar, W. V., “Nineteenth-century Speculations on the Complexity of the Chemical Elements”, Brit. J. Hist. Sci., ii (1965), 297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For a very recent discussion of these difficulties, see Hückel, W., J. prakt. Chem., xxxiii (1966), 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 W. Lossen (1838–1906), Professor in Königsberg, remembered for the “Lossen rearrangement” of hydroxamic acids.

5 Idem., “Über die Vertheilung der Atome in der Molekel”, Liebig Ann., cciv (1880), 265.Google Scholar

6 Idem., “Üeber die Lage der Atome in Raum”, Ber. dtsch. chem. Ges., xx (1887), 3306.Google Scholar

7 Lossen's theories of variable valency of course made other explanations possible.

8 Translations in this paper are free rather than literal; responsibility for them is the author's own.

9 Neither van't Hoff nor Le Bel took any notice of Lossen. The former thought that the directional nature of chemical forces had its origin in the non-spherical shape of the atoms (Ansichten über organische Chemie (Braunschweig, 1878Google Scholar). This idea was taken up by several chemists, including Wunderlich (1886), Auwers (1890) and Knorr (1894).

10 Wislicenus, J. A., “Ueber die Lage der Atome im Raum—Antwort auf W. Lossen's Frage”, Ber. dtsch. chem. Ges., xxi (1888), 581CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wislicenus was at that time Professor in Leipzig.

11 It is impossible to agree with Wislicenus that “affinity units” are parts of our actual experience; reaction against the positivism of the middle of the century has gone too far.

12 V. Meyer and E. Riecke, “Einige Bemerkungen über das Kohlenstoffatom und die Valenz”, ibid., xxi (1888), 946. Victor Meyer (1848–1897) was Professor of Chemistry, and Eduard Riecke (1845–1915) Professor of Physics in Göttingen.

13 The similarity of these ideas to some expressed by Berzelius as early as 1819 has been pointed out to me.

14 A. Hantzsch and A. Werner, ibid., xxiii (1890), 11.