History
Zeise's salt was one of the first organometallic compounds to be reported. Its inventor W. C. Zeise, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, prepared this compound in 1820s while investigating the reaction of PtCl4 with boiling ethanol, and proposed that the resulting compound contained ethylene. Justus von Liebig, an influential chemist of that era, often criticised Zeise's proposal, but Zeise's theories were decisively supported in 1868 when Birnbaum prepared the complex using ethylene.
Zeise's salt received a great deal of attention during the second half of the 19th century because chemists could not properly explain the molecular structure of the salt. This question remained unanswered until the advent of x-ray diffraction in the 20th century.
Zeise's salt stimulated much scientific research in the field of organometallic chemistry, and would be key in defining new concepts in chemistry such as Hapticity. The Dewar-Chatt-Duncanson model explains how the metal is coordinated to the double bond.
Read more about this topic: Zeise's Salt
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)