biography
| name: |
Couper, Archibald Scott
|
pronunciation:
[kooper]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1831–92)
|
| biography:
| Organic chemist, born in Kirkintilloch, East Dunbartonshire, WC Scotland, UK. He studied classics at Glasgow and philosophy at Edinburgh, then turned to chemistry, and studied in Paris under Charles Adolphe Wurtz (1817–84). In 1858 he asked Wurtz to present to the French Academy a paper in which he argued that carbon had a valence of two or four; and that its atoms could self-link to form chains. Wurtz procrastinated in his presentation, and Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz published first. Couper returned to Edinburgh ignored as a chemist, and suffered a permanent depressive illness. His work was later discovered by Kekulé's successor at Bonn, and given belated recognition. |
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