August Kekulé (1829-1896), a German professor of chemistry, had the most important dreams since the Bible: they led to scientific breakthroughs! They allowed him to work out how atoms go together to make different molecules – chemical structure. From that we know how to make chemicals, even stuff not found in nature, like plastic.
His family sent him to university to become an architect. But there he fell in love with chemistry instead. His parents were against it – there was no money in chemistry in those days – but he did not care.
Dream #1: The Dancing Atoms
One night in London on a late bus home Kekule fell asleep and dreamed of dancing atoms. At first they danced by themselves but then they joined hands and made pairs and then chains. The bigger atoms had more hands than smaller ones.
From this he got the idea that carbon atoms can bond with four other atoms and can form chains.
In the early 1800s scientists had worked out the chemical formulas for many substances. They found out, for example, that the alcohol in beer is made up of molecules that have two carbon atoms, six hydrogens and one oxygen:
C2H6O
But chemical formulas only told you how many atoms of each kind there were. It told you nothing about chemical structure, about how they went together.
The key was to know each chemical element’s valence: how many other atoms it could bond with.
As Kekule discovered, carbon had a valence of four. Oxygen had a valence of two and hydrogen, one.
Knowing that you can fit together the atoms of an alcohol molecule like so:
Or, in ball-and-stick form:
From structures like these it became clear how different chemicals could be put together – or taken apart – to form other chemicals.
These sort of structures worked well for most substances being studied at the time but not for benzene:
Dream #2: The Snake
Benzene has six atoms of carbon and six of hydrogen. According to Kekule’s ideas that was impossible. And yet benzene was real.
For years and years Kekule studied carbon-based chemistry (organic chemistry) but no luck. And then one night he fell asleep in front of his fireplace and had a dream.
He dreamed of snakes, long rows of them, moving and twisting. Then one of the snakes took hold of his tail to make a circle!
That was it: benzene was based not on a straight chain of carbon atoms but on a circle of six:
Notice the double bonds between some of the carbon atoms.
Because it is such a common chemical structure, it is now written like this for short:
Kekule did not live long enough to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but his students won three of the first five: Jacobus van ‘t Hoff (1901), Hermann Fischer (1902) and Adolf von Baeyer (1905). Van ‘t Hoff added the idea of 3-D chemical structures. Von Baeyer used Kekule’s ideas to make indigo (the blue dye in blue jeans).
See also:
Thanks for this interesting post, Abagond.
That was the period in time when European scientist were all fascinated with South American plants & herbs and ‘coca-yene’
Are you sure he did not use a little mind-altering ‘chemical’ assistance that helped magnify his dreams
It’s interesting that he saw benzene as a snake…it’s a known carcingen that is dangerous to the human body.
yes, science without the drama
thank you abagond.
amazing what dreams can reveal i memorized this whole song:
I knew the part of the story involving the dream of the snake, but I never knew the first part or that his parents wanted him to be an architect. It’s a shame he didn’t live long enough to win a Nobel Prize, but at least he followed his dreams and did what he wanted to do.
It’s obvious, that there were plenty, ‘genius ‘caucasians’ and ‘nonblacks, who made such discoveries. Were there any ‘genius’ Africans or Black Americans who had similar discoveries and ephiphanies that were non music, art, entertainment, related?
Very very interesting. Thank god for the really brilliant people who can figure out these things so I simply live ha ha ha.
Were there any ‘genius’ Africans or Black Americans who had similar discoveries and ephiphanies that were non music, art, entertainment, related?
Egyptians:
Pyramids, papyrus, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Boykin
There are many more of course.
For years and years Kekule studied carbon-based chemistry (organic chemistry) but no luck. And then one night he fell asleep in front of his fireplace and had a dream.
He dreamed of snakes, long rows of them, moving and twisting. Then one of the snakes took hold of his tail to make a circle!
That was it: benzene was based not on a straight chain of carbon atoms but on a circle of six.
I remember Kekule from studying chemistry, I found that visualizing the hydrocarbon molecules helped me to better understand the processes of organic chemistry.
Fascinating how those eary scientists figured this stuff out. Guys like Kekule would probably be diagnosed as autistic today.
At an earlier level, one wonders how humans figured out things like which species of mushrooms are edible. If somebody next to you eats a mushroom and dies, it doesn’t seem like the logical response would be to try eating another mushroom that looks a little different.
How did humans come to eat hot chili peppers, which are physically painful to ingest until one gets used to them? I realize hunger and necessity can force the decision, but I’m just saying.
Or how did people figure out how to make beer? What logic would cause one to gather a bunch of grain seeds, roast some and grind them, let others sprout and then roast and grind them, mix it all in water and boil it, filter out the solids and add some yeast (where did they learn about yeast?), add some bitter herbs to balance the flavor, let it sit until it gets all bubbly and then drink it? Who would do that?
On the other end of things are charlatans and hucksters pushing all manner of snake oil with fancy pseudo-scientific sounding jargon, much of it within the MLM world, such as the so-called “H12O6″ water.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=538176
@Blanc2
Food selection is pretty simple: feed strange foods to undesirables (clan criminals, “weak” children, sick animals, etc.), and keep track of the results. Any group of humans that grew large enough to be unable to keep track of all of its members would “discover” a lot of hazards (anyone who’s ever raised children has snatched at least one child from certain death at least once. With primeval living, a missing child would be found in a close clearing, surrounded by colorful flora. Then, if/when someone broke a rule, take the rulebreaker and make him sample a small amount of the potential hazard. After that, try it on an ailing herd animal. Coincidentally, medicines were also discovered in this manner.)
As far as beer is concerned, all you need is a store of grain(s), a considerable heat source (like, let’s say, a smithy or a communal hearth) and a unexpected supply of water (rain, flooding, etc.) Beer cultures have all of those characteristics. Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Xin(China) created beer independently of each other, but they were all civilisations in which grain(s) would be stored in massive houses under extreme levels of heat and pressure. Let a flood occur (or an inconvenient leak of rain), have a group of farmers try to salvage the close-to-sprouting grain, place the sprouting grain with some “marginal”/”spare” grain of another type (while ignoring that weird grey stuff that seems to pop up whenever grain gets wet because its yucky but edible, and all food is good food in a refrigeration-free world), then (you knew that this was coming) a kid comes along and tries some of the fizzy water emanating from the side of the storehouse wall. A round of experimenting, then all of a sudden…
Hot peppers is even simpler. Aside from humans and some types of insects and birds, capsaicin is as palatable as muriatic acid. Animals as large as tigers and bears can be incapacitated by common red pepper. If we piggyback on the “give it to undesirables and write-offs and see what happens”, theory, peppers would have been the type of plant that animals of all sizes would avoid. Give it to a criminal, see if he dies. Or, even more commonly, watch a child eat what he or she thinks is a ‘berry”, then become “super Mom” or “super Dad” by eating the same thing. After a generation or two, pepper usage becomes “our thing”. It’s used as a manliness ritual (young, post-pubertal boys are given “the hot drink” to consume, with the knowledge that they’ll be “real men” if they can drink it down without visible discomfort.) Let another few generations pass, then “our people” realise that a milder form of pepper makes slightly spoiled meat edible (eg. Jerk seasoning was created by slaves who would receive the worst leftover cuts of meat. If you’ve eaten jerk chicken or jerk pork, you know that even a touch too much of the sauce will render the meat as “tasteless” as water, all you feel/taste is the heat.)
Remember, ready access to food-preserving cold (Hell, ready access to food sans effort!), is less than a century old. Anything on the planet that could be used to make a joint of meat stretch for another meal, or that could add value to what would be essentially inedible grain, would be seen as a miracle. Alcohol as a social lubricant would ensure its perpetual value as a subset of any culture(from getting your warriors blindingly drunk prior to hand-to-hand combat, to giving it to reticent brides as a prehistoric ‘panny-droppa’.) And as thousands of ship captains and merchants have learned over the years, people will pay ridiculous amounts of money for anything that will male “plain” food and water taste better (America, as any British child could tell you, exists because the Yanks didn’t want to pay an extra penny a pound for tea.)
“MaMu1977
(eg. Jerk seasoning was created by slaves who would receive the worst leftover cuts of meat. If you’ve eaten jerk chicken or jerk pork, you know that even a touch too much of the sauce will render the meat as “tasteless” as water, all you feel/taste is the heat.)”
Linda says,
Not sure which country you are referring to but in Jamaica, where we made Jerk pork/chicken famous worldwide,
Jerk seasoning was created by the original Maroons, a group made up of Taino Indians and African former slaves of the Spanish. This group lived in the mountains after the British invaded the island.
They combined their knowledge of cooking and preserving meat; this method allowed them to store food that was ready to eat (through out the next 200 years, they waged a guerilla war against the British)
The Tainos introduced/taught the Africans how to use the plants/herbs native to the Island such as allspice, scotch bonnet pepper and other herbs and their style of cooking their meat on top of pimento wood (jerking). The Africans in turn introduced/taught the Tainos about their herbs and how to jerk the meat by placing it in underground pitts (using wood, coal is used now)
This style of cooking eventually found it’s way amongst the slave population because of contact with Maroons when they came downhill.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02jerk.html?pagewanted=all
The Taino’s method of jerking (cooking their meat on top of pimento wood), was called ‘charki’ meaning ‘dried meat’ or ‘barbacoa’ meaning ‘meat smoking tool’– the pirates and the Spanish colonist learned this method from the Tainos — this was where the term ‘Jerk’ and ‘Barbecue’ came from.
http://www.nilsarodriguez.com/thefirstbarbacoa.htm
The worst leftover cuts of the meat you referenced was/is called the ‘fifth quarter’–typically parts of the meat like tail, head, tripe, chicken back, cows foot–these parts were used in soups and stews that people still eat today.
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20020731/cook/cook1.html
@Linda
Thanks for the extra details. My knowledge of the history of jerk seasoning begins and ends with my uncle (who is a notorious BS artist.
You’re welcome.
Native Indian and African cultures, traditions, plants/medicine plays a huge part in western society but they never get the acknowledgement that they deserve
Egypt. LOL! That’s always the only answer.(No connection to majority Blacks and no proof of their Blackness either)
Where is the modern discovery of Africans/Black inventions?
@ Anomymous
I have a better question; where are YOUR inventions? LOL!