History
Coordination complexes were known – although not understood in any sense – since the beginning of chemistry, e.g. Prussian blue and copper vitriol. The key breakthrough occurred when Alfred Werner proposed in 1893 that Co(III) bears six ligands in an octahedral geometry. His theory allows one to understand the difference between coordinated and ionic in a compound, for example chloride in the cobalt ammine chlorides and to explain many of the previously inexplicable isomers.
In 1914, Werner resolved the first coordination complex, called hexol, into optical isomers, overthrowing the theory that only carbon compounds could possess chirality.
Read more about this topic: Coordination Complex
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)