¶ van’t Hoff
Index Entry
van’t Hoff: Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff: (1852-1911)
“van’t Hoff said he though this oneness, twoness, threeness and fourness has something to do with tetrahedra. . . . He went to work very hard and he lived to make optical proof with the microscope of the tetrahedronal configuration of carbon. He was the first man ever to receive the Nobel Prize. One reason the chemists hadn’t accredited him was that most chemists were metallurgists. Organic chemistry was a very new phase of chemistry and they hadn’t found any bonding in the metallurgy, so the chemists were simply bored with this phase of chemistry and when this man comes along with some kind of crystallographic configuration of conceptuality it annoyed them very much. They had been getting along very nicely with just numbers. They had the kind of relationships where they did not have to have the tetrahedron shape. Then there is a great hiatus after van’t Hoff and it goes up to 1932, and that is a half-century hiatus.”
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #2, p. '74. 2 Jul’62
