A chemical bond is any force of attraction that holds two atoms or ions together. In most cases, that force of attraction is between one or more electrons held by one of the atoms and the positively charged nucleus of the second atom. Chemical bonds vary widely in their stability, ranging from relatively strong covalent bonds to very weak hydrogen bonds.
Relatively little progress could occur in the field of bonding theory, of course, until the concept of an atom itself was clarified. When John Dalton proposed the modern atomic theory in 1803, he specifically hypothesized that atoms would combine with each other to form "compound atoms." Dalton's concept of bonding was essentially non-existent, however, and he imagined that at…
Some of the most vigorous speculation about chemical bonding took place in the young field of organic chemistry. In trying to understand the structure of organic compounds, for example, Friedrich Kekulé suggested that the carbon atom is tetravalent; that is, it can bond to four other atoms. He also hypothesized that carbon atoms could bond with each other almost endlessly in long chains. Ke…
The discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson in 1897 was, in the long run, the key needed to solve the problem of bonding. In the short run, however, it was a serious hindrance to resolving that issue. The question that troubled many chemists at first was how two particles with the same electrical charge (as atoms then seemed to be) could combine with each other. An answer to that dilemma slowly…
Credit for the development of the modern theory of chemical bonding belongs largely to the great American chemist Linus Pauling. Early in his career, Pauling learned about the revolution in physics that was taking place largely in Europe during the 1920s. That revolution had come about with the discovery of the relativity theory, quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, the duality of matter …
The term that Pauling developed for this concept is electronegativity. Electronegativity is, in a general sense, the tendency of an atom to attract the electrons in a covalent bond. The numerical values for the electronegativities of the elements range from a maximum of 4.0 for fluorine to a minimum of about 0.7 for cesium. A bond formed between fluorine and cesium would tend to be ionic because f…
Other types of chemical bonds also exist. The atoms that make up a metal, for example, are held together by a metallic bond. A metallic bond is one in which all of the metal atoms share with each other a cloud of electrons. The electrons that make up that cloud originate from the outermost energy levels of the atoms. A hydrogen bond is a weak force of attraction that exists between two atoms or io…
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