Notable pioneering chemists such as Liebig and Wohler went on to train an enormous number of chemists from all over Europe.  Many of these were highly successful and earned coveted spots in the newly established chemistry departments in universities across the continent. A few, though, lacking social graces or influential connections, worked in relative solitude in remote institutions and academic backwaters even as they made remarkable discoveries and innovations.  Principal among these outsiders were Charles Gerhardt (1816-1856) and Auguste Laurent (1807-1853).  These two Frenchmen always seemed to irritate and annoy the emerging chemical establishment in both Germany and France and were ridiculed and shunned for much of their professional careers.  Nevertheless, their innovative thinking led to the first constructive and useful theories for considering the structures and formulas of organic compounds. Prior to their work, there existed no rational system for organizing the thousands of organic compounds into any coherent system and chemists could rarely agree even on a formula for a particular compound.  In Gerhardt and Laurent’s conception, the incredible variety of organic compounds could be simply organized into a few simple groups, or “types”, based on constitutional similarities.  This “Type Theory” revolutionized organic chemistry and made it possible for chemists to begin making predictions about chemical reactions based on the structure, or type, of compound involved. Today we have replaced this idea of “types” with “functional groups”, but the idea is much the same.