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Article: Lewis Structures
- Article from:
- Chemistry: Foundations and Applications
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Lewis Structures
In 1902, while trying to find a way to explain the Periodic Table to his students, the chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis discovered that the chemistry of the main-group elements could be explained using a model in which electrons arranged around atoms are conceived as occupying the faces of concentric cubes. This model was based on four assumptions.
The number of electrons in the outermost cube of an atom is equal to the number of electrons lost when the atom forms positive ions;
- each neutral atom has one more electron in its outermost cube than the atom that precedes it in the Periodic Table;
- it takes eight electrons
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an octet
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to complete a cube;
- once an atom ...