Organic chem

• Organic Chemistry is the chemistry of compounds that contain the element carbon
• Carbon has an atomic mass of 12.011 and atomic number 6
• Tornbern Bergman was the first to express the differences between compounds from living sources and non-living sources
• Gevela Jacob Berzelius first used the term 'organic'
• Theory of Vitalism stated that organic compounds only came from living organisms and only living things could synthesize organic compounds through the intervention of a vital force
• Michel-Eugène Chevreul studied soaps and demonstrated that it was possible to form new compounds from fats without the aid of a 'vital force'
• Friedrich Wöhler discovered that urea could be made by evaporating an aqueous solution of ammonium cyanate
• William Brande was the first to discover naphthalene
• William Henry Perkin accidentally manufactured the organic dye known as 'Perkin's mauve'
• Friedrich August Kekulé, Archibald Scott Couper, and Alexander Butlerov laid the basis for the structural theory
• Structural Theory:

  • The atoms in organic compounds can form a fixed number of bonds using their outermost shell (valence) electrons
  • A carbon atom can use one or more of its valence electrons to form bonds to other carbon atoms
• Jacobus Hendricus van’t Hoff and Joseph Achille Le Bel expanded the structural formulas into three dimensions
• Gilbert Newton Lewis and Walther Kössel explained the nature of chemical bonds
• Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac advanced the theory of atomic and molecular structure
• 'organic' is still used today by some people to mean 'coming from living things', e.g. 'organic vitamin' refers to a vitamin isolated from a natural source and not synthesized by a chemist