Alfred Werner

On the 15th November 1959 the modern Olympic games was first revived in Athens, in 1974 Intel released the world’s first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004 and in  1977, 4 years and a day after her wedding, Princess Anne gave birth to a son the first royal baby to be born a commoner for more than 500 years because Princess Anne possessed no hereditary title.

On the 15th November 1919 Nobel Prize winning chemist Alfred Werner Died. Werner was born in 1866 in Mulhouse, Alsace. He read chemistry in Zürich where he obtained his doctorate in 1890. After postdoctoral study in Paris, he returned to Zürich to teach in 1892, and became a professor as well a Swiss citizen in 1895.

Werner won the 1913 Nobel Prize for his work on coordination numbers, The coordination number of a central atom in a molecule or crystal is the number of nearest neighbours that the atom has.


the central carbon atom of a methane molecule has a coordination number of 4


Before Werner, chemists defined the valence of an element as the number of its bonds without distinguishing different types of bond. This resulted in some difficulties when approaching transition metal complexes which exhibit ligand bonding. His work was used by Gilbert N. Lewis who devised the rather useful octet rule.