| Kekulé was
a student of architecture in Germany when he came under the influence
of Liebig. Kekulé later
became a professor of chemistry at Ghent and then at Bonn. He was
a brilliant and daring thinker
who became one of the most important figures in the history of
chemistry. Along with another, relatively unknown, chemist called
Couper, his ideas about valence and the ability of carbon atoms
to link with each other brought order to the chaos in which chemists
had found themselves after the collapse of dualism. One night,
he dreamed of atoms "twisting and turning like serpents",
which led him to the structure of benzene. This dream is legendary
in chemistry.
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