Butlerov, Alexander Mikhailovich

Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov, 1828-1886. Russian organic chemist. He worked with K. K. Klaus on the preparation of antimony at the University of Kazan and later studied organic chemistry under N. N. Zinin. After working with some of the most famous chemists in Europe and serving as professor of chemistry at the University of Kazan he was appointed ordinary professor of chemistry at the University of St. Petersburg. See ref. (94). 

Leicester, Henry M, Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov, ibid., 17, 203-9... 

Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov (1828-1886), Russian chemist, introduces the term chemical structure to mean that the chemical nature of a molecule is determined not only by the number and type of a atoms but also by their arrangement. 

In a now famous article, Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov declared that... 

Formaldehyde was first produced accidentally in 1859 by the Russian-French chemist Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov (1828-1886). It was first synthesized in 1867 by the German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann (1818-1892) who was not, however, able to collect the compound in... 

In particular, a Russian chemist, Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov (1828-86), supported the new system. During the 1860s, he pointed out how the use of structural formulas could explain the existence of isomers (see page 103). For instance, to use a very simple case, ethyl alcohol and dimethyl ether, although possessing widely different properties, have the same empirical formula C2HeO. The structural formulas of the two compounds are ... 

Today, a chemist makes an unconscious assumption whose validity was far from evident in the 1860s. This is that all the properties of a molecule derive solely from the atoms it contains and the way they are arranged. Although this idea may have been implicit in the work of Couper and Kekule, it was the Russian Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov (1828-1886) who clearly and consistently advocated the structure theory. In a paper of 1861 in which he first set out his views, he said Only one rational formula is possible for each compound, and when the general laws governing the dependence of chemical properties on chemical structure have been derived, this formula will represent all these properties. . The more cautious Kekule continued to use type formulae, as well as his sausage formulae (Chapter 8), for several years after 1861. 

Following the publication of stractural theory for all to examine, the next major players in its development were the Russian, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov (1828-1886), the Scot, Alexander Cmm Brown (1838-1922), and the Austrian, Joharm Josef Loschmidt (1821-1895). 

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