Rutherford, Lewis

Why this emphasis Schweber has portrayed Slater as a man who developed a deep feeling of both inferiority and competitiveness toward his European mentors and peers in the fields of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics. Slater was not alone in this reaction, as Henry James made clear. Slater, like other American physicists and chemists, used his influence in Boston, New York, and Washington circles, as well as his position within his own institution, to build up American science in an area where Americans could take a competitive lead. 107 Donnan had written Lewis in 1921 that "you are making old Europe sit up some. If it wasn t for Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, and Bragg, we should be in a bad way." 108 But it was not enough for Europeans to sit up "some" they must be made to gawk. 

It is time-consuming to draw electron arrangements using Bohr-Rutherford diagrams. It is much simpler to use Lewis structures to represent elements and the valence electrons of their atoms. To draw a Lewis structure, you replace the nucleus and inner energy levels of an atom with its atomic symbol. Then you place dots around the atomic symbol to represent the valence electrons. The order in which you place the first four dots is up to you. You may find it simplest to start at the top and proceed clockwise right, then bottom, then left. 

Although valency strokes have been customary in chemical formulae for a century, one could not until recently attach to them any real notion about their true nature. On the patient paper one operated with them as with hooks which were undone, rotated etc. at will. Even the Rutherford-Bohr theory of the atom furnished no explanation, not even for the bonding of two hydrogen atoms to form a hydrogen molecule. The successful octet theory and the Lewis and Langmuir theory of the electron-pair bond associated with it was also still purely formal, but later was seen to be essentially correct. 

R.A. Larson and E.J. Weber, Reaction Mechanisms in Environmental Organic Chemistry, Lewis Publishers, CRC Press LLC, Florida, 1994. C.T. Chiou, D.E. Kile, D.W. Rutherford, G. Sheng and S.A. Boyd, Environ. Sci. TechnoL, 2000, 34, 1254—1258. 

Lewis, A., Wilkie, J., Rutherford, T.J. and Gani, D. (1998) Design, construction and properties of peptide N-terminal cap templates devised to initiate a-helices. Part 2. Caps derived from N-[(2S)-2-chloropropionyl]-(2S)-Pro-(2S)-Pro-(2S,4S)-4-thioPro-OMe. /. Chem. Soc. Perkin Trans. 1 3777 -3793. 

One consequence of the discovery of the structure of atoms through the work of Rutherford was that the concept of chemical bonding became a subject of theoretical consideration. In Bohr s theory, the most loosely bound electrons, the valence electrons, are responsible for chemical bonding. Before quantum mechanics was completed, Kossel, Lewis, and Langmuir invented a phenomenological electronic concept, the electron pair bond, corresponding to the dash used previously to indicate a covalent bond between atoms. 

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