Lewis theory fundamental ideas

Fig. 2.18 Alfred Werner (1866-1919) is usually described as the founder of coordination chemistry. Werner did his Ph.D. in 1889 with Professor Arthur Hantzsch and, after spending one semester with Marcellin Berthelot at the College de France at Paris, returned to the ETH at Zurich to finish his Habilitation in 1892. One year later, he became Associate Professor at the University of Zurich and was promoted as Professor of Chemistry in 1895. Remarkably, despite the widespread attention for his groundbreaking coordination theory, he was not permitted to give the basic lecture in inorganic chemistry before 1902. Werner attracted students from all over the world, supervised 230 Ph.D. theses and was the first Swiss to receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1913. In his famous book Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules , published in 1923, Gilbert N. Lewis wrote ...in attempting to clarify the fundamental ideas of valence, there is no work to which I feel so much personal indebtedness as to this of Werner s (photo from Helv. Chim. Acta 75, 21-61 (1992) reproduced with permission of Dr. Kisaktirek, Editor of Helvetica Chimica Acta)...

Considerable progress in the development of theoretical and synthetic coordination and organometallic chemistry was made with the use of electron ideas. Lewis elaborated in 1923 the classic electron theory of acids and bases [30], and used it to explain the coordination ideas of Werner [31] (in Ref. 32, this achievement is ascribed to Sidgwick). A Lewis acid (A) is a acceptor of the electron pair and a Lewis base (B) is its donor [33], In other words, A is a species that can form a new covalent bond by accepting a pair of electrons and B is a species that can form a new covalent bond by donating a pair of electrons. The fundamental Lewis acid-base theory is described by a direct equlibrium [Scheme (1.1)], leading to the formation of the adduct (acid-base complex) ... 

G. N. Lewis ideas of atoms and bonds with the classical structural theory. The result of this alliance is a structural theory whose fundamental concepts are valence electrons and atomic kernels. This electronic structural theory, and its application to organic chemistry, is the subject matter of this book. 

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