History of Chemistry

Source-derived questions

Questions extracted from the papers in this topic, excluding the curated questions above.

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

Sources

• Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
• Lewis and Langmuir develop electron-shell model of bonding
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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