- Why did most chemists in the 1880s doubt that spatial arrangement of atoms in a molecule was physically real?
History of Chemistry
The people and discoveries that shaped chemistry.
- Why did Arrhenius's examiners at Uppsala react so poorly to his theory of electrolytic dissociation?
- How does Rutherford's demonstrated transmutation of elements compare to the alchemists' historical dream of transmutation?
- What made nineteenth-century terpene chemistry so confused before Wallach's work?
- Why did Lewis wait roughly fourteen years between sketching the cubical atom model and publishing his 1916 paper?
- How long did it take Wieland to work out the structure of bile acids?
- Why did the chemical establishment of the 1920s consider molecules with weights in the hundreds of thousands too unstable to exist?
- How did Semenov in Leningrad and Hinshelwood in Oxford arrive at the same mechanism independently?
- Where did the chemistry term 'orbital' come from, and who coined it?
- How was ferrocene first discovered, and why did its stability puzzle chemists in 1951?
- How did organic synthesis work before Corey's framework, and why was it hard to teach?
- What three separate breakthroughs did John Bockris claim to be pursuing simultaneously?
- Who first observed quantum confinement effects, and in what materials?