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G. N. Lewis's Views on Bond Theory 1900–16

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Robert E. Kohler
Robert E. Kohler
Affiliation:
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. 19174, U.S.A.
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Extract

In a recent paper on the origin of G. N. Lewis's concept of the shared electron pair bond, I argued that the sources of Lewis's novel conception were certain ideas of J. J. Thomson and Alfred Parson. Yet the only influence that Lewis explicitly acknowledged was neither of these, but Alfred Werner's. The following statement appears in his book, Valence (1923):

I still have poignant remembrance of the distress which I and many others suffered some thirty years ago in a class in elementary chemistry, where we were obliged to memorize structural formulae of a great number of inorganic compounds. Even such substances as the ferricyanides and ferryocyanides were forced into the system, and bonds were drawn between the several atoms to comply with certain artificial rules, regardless of all chemical evidence. Such formulae are now believed to be almost, if not entirely devoid of scientific significance. Such abuse of the structural formula inevitably led to a reaction which found its best expression in the publications of Werner. His Neuere Anschauungen … (1905) marked a new epoch in chemistry; and in attempting to clarify the fundamental ideas of valence, there is no work to which I feel so much personal indebtedness as to this of Werner's.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , November 1975 , pp. 233 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1975

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References

REFERENCES

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