Linus Pauling and The Nature of the Chemical Bond: A Documentary History All Documents and Media  
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Sir William Lawrence Bragg
James Bryant Conant
Roscoe Dickinson
Samuel Goudsmit
Roger Hayward
Werner Heisenberg
Walter Heitler
Arthur Lamb
Irving Langmuir
G. N. Lewis
Fritz London
Robert Millikan
Robert Mulliken
A. A. Noyes
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Wolfgang Pauli
Linus Pauling
Erwin Schrödinger
John Slater
Arnold Sommerfeld
J. Holmes Sturdivant
Richard Tolman
Max Theodore Felix von Laue
Don Yost

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Portrait of Walter Heitler
Portrait of Walter Heitler, 1934.
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Walter Heitler

1904-1981

Lectures, 1929-1931
Location: Mathematisches Institut, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.
Address: Bunsenstraße 3-5 D-37073 Göttingen Germany
Size: Several cabinets.
Phone: +49-551-397752  Fax: +49-551-392985
Web: http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/library/20699.html

 

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"I slept till very late in the morning, found I couldn’t do work at all, had a quick lunch, went to sleep again in the afternoon and slept until five o’clock. When I woke up...I had clearly...the picture before me of the two wave functions of two hydrogen molecules joined together with a plus and minus and with the exchange in it. So I was very excited, and I got up and thought it out. As soon as I was clear that the exchange did play a role, I called London up, and he came to me as quickly as possible. Meanwhile I had already started developing a sort of perturbation theory. We worked together then until rather late at night, and then by that time most of the paper was clear.... Well...at least it was not later than the following day that we had the formation of the hydrogen molecule in our hands, and we also knew that there was a second mode of interaction which meant repulsion between two hydrogen atoms, also new at the time –- new to chemists, too."

Walter Heitler. AHQP (Archive for the History of Quantum Physics), volume 6. March 18, 1963.

"The paper of Heitler and London on H2 for the first time seemed to provide a basic understanding, which could be extended to other molecules. Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena soon used the valence bond method. . . . As a master salesman and showman, Linus persuaded chemists all over the world to think of typical molecular structures in terms of the valence bond method."

Robert Mulliken. Life of a Scientist, pp. 60-61. 1989.

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