Chemistry Commandment #1: The Octet Rule

The rule of 8 becomes the “the octet rule” and serves as a unifying force to better understand chemical bonding

“I am a real Americannnnn” — sorry, I have that jam in my head from last time (hey, it’s better than the Shawn Michaels theme). I’m still all tingly from acknowledging the first ‘Merikan to significantly contribute to the history of chemistry. That’s not to say that ‘Merikans haven’t contributed — it’s just the first time we’ve encountered one on this journey as I’m presenting it. Lewis’ method for visually depicting bonds was revolutionary, but he wasn’t done yet…

Chemists had been struggling to devise a unitary theory of bonding for organic compounds for quite a while with limited success. Part of the problem was that organic chemists were largely considered the best practicing experimentalists of the time who had compiled enormous tracts of empirical data. That immense library meant that they didn’t really care about developing an underlying theory of bonding because they basically already knew how things would react.

Justus von Liebig (one of the first organic chemists and the father of the modern graduate chemistry lab) and his crew basically analyzed thousands of organic compounds long before Lewis was born | Source

To understand why that matters, we have to go back to understanding why anyone would care about chemical bonding in the first place. One of the allures of understanding chemical bonding is that it helps predict reactivity…