🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <NS14.93Jan9190020@crux3.crux2.cit.cornell.edu>, ns14@crux3.crux2.cit.cornell.edu (Nathan Otto Siemers) writes:

|> 	How about the tetrahedral nature of the carbon atom?  The idea
|> and subsequent notions of stereochemistry were first posited by Van
|> Hoft and Lebel  (sp?).   Wohler,  widely considered to be the "father"
|> of organic chemistry,  denounced them as mystics quite publicly.
|> 
|> 
|> 	Slightly more specialized is the decades long argument about
|> hypervalent carbon,  fought to the death, literally, by H.C. Brown and
|> the late Saul Winstein.  Winstein happened to be correct, but it
|> wasn't conclusively demonstrated until after his death.  Literally
|> MILLIONS and MILLIONS of dollars were spent fighting this chemistry
|> "war". 

I am not familiar with the details of these episodes.  I do seem to
recall that certain of the fundamental ideas of Avogadro were
ignored (even ridiculed?) for quite some time despite the fact that
ultimately they proved to be correct.  However, a closer look at this
particular episode shows that although Avogadro had the correct insight,
neither he nor anyone else at the time at a reasonably successful
theoretical structure that could compete with the one currently in
vogue (and with respect to which his ideas appeared to be a bit wild).
-- 
Gary H. Merrill  [Principal Systems Developer, C Compiler Development]
SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Dr. / Cary, NC  27513 / (919) 677-8000
sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com ... !mcnc!sas!sasghm