Werner Werner was born on December , , in Mülhouse, a small community in the French province of Alsace. His study of chemistry began in Karlsruhe (Germany) and continued in Zurich (Switzerland), where in his doctoral thesis in , he explained the difference in properties of certain nitrogen containing organic substances on the basis of isomerism. He extended vant Hoff’s theory of tetrahedral carbon atom and modified it for nitrogen. Werner showed optical and electrical differences between complex compounds based on physical measurements.
In fact, Werner was the first to discover optical activity in certain coordination compounds. He, at the age of years became a full professor at Technische Hochschule in Zurich in . Alfred Werner was a chemist and educationist. His accomplishments included the development of the theory of coordination compounds.
This theory, in which Werner proposed revolutionary ideas about how atoms and molecules are linked together, was formulated in a span of only three years, from to . The remainder of his career was spent gathering the experimental support required to validate his new ideas. Werner became the first Swiss chemist to win the Nobel Prize in for his work on the linkage of atoms and the coordination theory. ( - ) ( - ) ( - ) ( - ) ( - ) ( a ) Coordination entity A coordination entity constitutes a central metal atom or ion bonded to a fixed number of ions or molecules.
For example, [CoCl (NH ) ] is a coordination entity in which the cobalt ion is surrounded by three ammonia molecules and three chloride ions. Other examples are [Ni(CO) ], [PtCl (NH ) ], [Fe(CN) ] – , [Co(NH ) ] + . (b) Central atom/ion In a coordination entity, the atom/ion to which a fixed number of ions/groups are bound in a definite geometrical arrangement around it, is called the central atom or ion. For example, the central atom/ion in the coordination entities: [NiCl (H O) ], [CoCl(NH ) ] + and [Fe(CN) ] – are Ni + ,