History
The idea of a correlation between molecular geometry and number of valence electrons (both shared and unshared) was first presented in a Bakerian Lecture in 1940 by Nevil Sidgwick and Herbert Powell at the University of Oxford. In 1957 Ronald Gillespie and Ronald Sydney Nyholm at University College London refined this concept to build a more detailed theory capable of choosing between various alternative geometries.
Read more about this topic: VSEPR Theory
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