13It came in d dreams of Aragorn when he felt asleep dis afternoon... as soon as he picked up d buk of benzene and its properties... [3] [3] [3]
This is the story about how Augustus Kekule had come to the structure of benzene. This is the only part of organic chemistry that I like........no...not the reactions and properties of benzene.........I only like the way Kekule discovered it [3]
Anyway, here's the story:
Kekule was tired. He was frustrated. He was angry [16]. He was everything a scientist would be when he is at the verge of a ground-breaking proposal. He had done all the tests required to find the structure of benzene and while doing so he had got it's molecular formula.
He was now sitting on his favourite armchair, thinking of a way to arrange six carbons and six hydrogens [12]. Various possibilities ran through his head but all of them failed to explain the results of the tests he had conducted [2]. He continued to think on and on and on....... thinking so much that he fell asleep [13]......something that I do whenever I pick up a book [3].
In his dreams, the straight chain carbon structures were dancing in front of him....... and suddenly they turned into snakes.............snakes here........snakes there..........snakes everywhere. Some snakes were chasing others.........some were dancing as if to a tune........... some were doing a dance as if in mockery of Kekule's efforts. But there was one particular snake that caught his interest. He looked at this snake for a long time figuring out what was about this snake that had caught his attention........ and suddenly he saw that this snake was chasing it's own tail [11] (something that dogs normally do)
And suddenly he woke up drenched in sweat, realizing what was missing in his ideas..................a cyclic structure
The snake catching it's own tail gave Kekule the impression of a cyclic compound...................and so the legendary structure of the benzene ring was born.
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11Kekule came in my dreams and informed me about his dreams [3]
But I wasn't reading benzene and it's properties..........I was reading my 11th std chemistry textbook
49"I was sitting writing at my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire, ad dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated vision of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformations; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twisting and turning in snake-like motion. But look! what was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my own eyes. As if by flash of lightening, I woke...I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we will learn the truth."__August Kekule, 1890.