As the science of organic chemistry developed, so too did the desire of chemists to be associated with its grandest discoveries and breakthroughs.  Disputes over priority, or who had discovered or synthesized something first, were commonplace. Oftentimes, depending on the adversaries involved, these disputes had overtones of nationalism or anti-Semitism.  Among the most significant of all priority disputes was the battle over the structure of benzene.  Benzene, C6H6, is an important compound and is found as a subunit in an extraordinarily large number of compounds.   First isolated from coal oil by Michael Faraday in England in 1825, the determination of its actual structure (or arrangement and connection of its atoms in three-dimensional space) became a major problem in organic chemistry in the mid-nineteenth century.  The problem was solved by the German chemist Friedrich August Kekule (1829-1896), who published his proposed structure in 1865.

Significantly, Kekule had earlier taken credit for another key breakthrough having to do with the tetravalence of carbon, or the tendency for carbon atoms to form four bonds.  In this earlier priority dispute, he failed to give credit to the Scottish chemist Archibald Scott Couper, who had proposed an identical theory, but whose paper was help up in the publishing process by an ally of Kekule’s.  Couper, who had also speculated correctly on the structure of benzene, was so crushed by this disappointment that he went into a long mental decline from which he apparently never recovered. Kekule went on to a long and celebrated career, never acknowledging the contributions of his Scottish rival to the determination of the benzene’s structure.