The Architect of Molecules

It may sound quite strange, but for me, as for other scientists on whom these kinds of imaginative images have a greater effect than other poems do, no science is at its very heart more closely related to poetry, perhaps, than is chemistry. Justus liebic  

Now you meet with none of these afflictions in [a London] omnibus sameness there can never be.. . . We believe that there is no instance upon record, of a man s having gone to sleep in one of these vehicles. 

Dickens, Sketches by Boz (Penguin edition, 1995), 167. This sketch first appeared in 1834. 

The present chapter will follow Kekule s early years, through his London period. In the process we will review the mutually interacting ideas of several of Kekule s predecessors and contemporaries that were developed into the concept that is now known as valence. We will also provide a preliminary assessment of his famous autobiographical tale of a striking vision he later claimed to have had while dozing aboard a horse-drawn London omnibus, which (he said) led him from valence theory to the much more consequential theory of chemical structure. 

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