Early Work in Heidelberg

In proposing this marsh gas type, Kekule was doubtless carrying further the suggestions of William Odling s March 1855 paper on hydrocarbon radicals. But the predecessor whom Kekule explicitly named was not the atomic skeptic Odling, nor Gerhardt, but rather Dumas, who in 1840 had published a table similar to Kekule s, headed by a formula for marsh gas. Choosing his words carefully, Kekule stated that he was 

Although these two papers contain no theoretical statements other than those just cited, their content is consistent with the idea that Kekule was deliberately building the factual groundwork for a future more general statement about how one might use the substitution-values of atoms schematically to build up proposed molecular constitutions. It is even possible that Kekule may have chosen precisely the fulminate series for his efforts because it so clearly illustrated the tet-ratomic (i.e., tetravalent) nature of carbon.  

Counting Kekule s second fulminate paper, seven papers appeared from Kekule s tiny lab in the course of 1857, three of which were by his 

This suggestion was made by Erwin Hiebert, in Experimental Basis (1959), 326. Kekule s constitution for the fuiminates is quite different from the modern view, in which mercury fulminate is HgO-N=C. But the chemistry of these and related compounds is complicated. 

For more on this issue, see Kolbe s critique in Journal fUr praktische Chemie 132 (1881) 398 and Kekui6 s unpublished response to Kolbe in Zur Geschichte der Valenztheorie, in Anschutz, 1 498, 558 also Anschutz s own commentary, 1 85. 

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