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Chemistry’s Embrace of the Occult
Gilbert N. Lewis puts a theory of chemical bonding into pictures while sending the number 8 into chemistry canon
The last session ended with the discovery of this magical number 8. If I could personify the nature of an atom for a minute: it seems atoms are most comfortable when they have obtained 8 valence electrons. (I hope I just made my high school English teacher proud with my literary device usage.)
At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of this “rule of 8” was gaining more and more traction, but it was very new and difficult to teach. The person most responsible for making the number 8 part of chemistry canon as well as making the concept more accessible and coherent was Gilbert N. Lewis.
Gen chem students may recognize (organic chem students should certainly recognize it) the name as it holds two places in modern chemistry: Lewis dot structures and Lewis acids and bases. Lewis dot structures are the first, decently accurate attempts at describing the structure of compounds and chemical bonds. The story of his development of these structures gets a bit technical and is probably saved for its own article, but Lewis first started developing his theory of bonding as early as 1902, 20 years before Bohr’s work.
