Subatomic speculations

See M. J. Nye, "Nineteenth-Century Atomic Debates" and "Berthelot s Anti-Atomism," and Alan Rocke, "Subatomic Speculations and the Origin of Structure Theory," Ambix 30 (1983) 118. 

A. J. Rocke, Subatomic speculations and the origin of structure theory ,... 

A few months later, in his paper on glycol and its compounds, Wurtz introduced a new synonym for what he had hitherto called a "tribasic" atom or radical, namely, that it is "triatomic," signifying what we now would call trivalent. It is likely that this change of terminology is connected to his new idea. If his subatomic speculation were true, a "triatomic" atom can form connections to exactly three other atoms or radicals because it consists of precisely three permanently connected subatoms a single atom is thus in a very literal sense tri(sub)atomic. Thus, the new terminology, which was adopted almost immediately by... 

Berthelot, then by Kekule, then more generally by others in the European chemical community, may have encoded a veiled reference (by some but not all who availed themselves of the terms) to Wurtz s subatomic speculation. 

Wurtz s speculation probably had been sparked by his reading of Laurent s book, published just months earlier, but we see that Wurtz had applied the idea of subatoms in quite a different way and for quite a different purpose than Laurent had. Wurtz s subatomic speculation had an interesting life after its birth in the summer of 1855. In any case, the work described here opened a floodgate of new reactions and syntheses that poured forth from Wurtz s laboratory in the following few years. In the words of his friend A. W. Hofmann, Wurtz "conjure[d] a galaxy of new compounds before the mental eye of chemists." And especially before the mental eye of one chemist in particular, as we will see in the next section. 

Let us put ourselves in Kekule s shoes, in London in the summer of 1855. The science was rapidly changing, even month by month. In March 1855 Odling had orally presented his paper on hydrocarbon radicals, and it is likely that Kekule was an interested observer. In April Wurtz s article on the constitution of the glyceryl radical was printed. Then in June and July Wurtz published his work on the "mixed" radicals (containing his subatomic speculation) in the Comptes rendus of the Acad mie des Sciences and the Annales de chimie et de physique, respectively we know that these articles appeared in print immediately and so would have been available to Kekule before his departure from London in September 1855. 

See the last section of chapter 2, this volume also Rocke, "Subatomic Speculations"... 

Subatomic Speculations and the Origin of Structure Theory." Ambix... 

I argued in chapter 2 that Wurtz s choice of the terms "triatomic," "polyatomic," and "atomicity" (Atomigkeit) (for what chemists later called trivalent, polyvalent, and valence) may have directly reflected his subatomic speculation, which pictured (e.g.) the "triatomic" nitrogen atom as an indissoluble accretion of three subatoms, each exerting one unit of valence that constitutes the ability to link with an affinity unit of another atom. I suggested further that this visual model may have formed the basis for Kekule s omnibus vision and for his theory of "atomicity of the elements." His choice of the term "affinity units" for what we now call valences is another indication that this was how he was thinking. 

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