July 6, 1940
Dear Harker:
I have just noticed again the letter by you and Dorothy Wrinch in the June issue of
the Journal of Chemical Physics, and have decided that its publication shows that
you are in need of some advice.
The general tone of the letter indicates that it represents a criticism of the work
done here. Even if there were grounds for this criticism, your personal indebtedness
to this Institute should have kept you from being a party to it.
As a matter of fact, it is clear to people who know the field that the various intimations
of unsatisfactory work here have no basis in fact, and that your letter is full of
unjustified assertions and insinuations. In the first place you suggest a revision
of the system of structural chemistry on the basis of new accurate interatomic distance
values. These values were, of course, obtained in our laboratories, and there is no
reason for you to think that we would overlook the possibility of using them; this
is, of course, one of the reasons for our going to the effort to make these investigations.
You intimate that I have assumed all bonds to have invariably the same energy and
the same length. Do you not remember my three values for the C=O bond, which is, in
fact, one of the bonds that you mentioned.
Your first figure is very closely related to that given by Penney in the Proceedings
of the Royal Society, A158, 306 (1937), and with the discussion in his paper his work effectively includes your
suggestion. In particular he has included benzene and other resonated molecules in
the way suggested by you three years later.
Your letter gives the impression that your Figure 2 represents something new. You
and Dorothy Wrench could not, of course, be ignorant of the fact that on Page 161
of my book there is the sentence beginning "It is noteworthy...", and that your contribution
in this respect has been merely to draw the figure corresponding exactly to this statement
of mine.
I have decided that, although the casual reader might be mislead by your letter into
thinking it represented some small contribution to knowledge, I shall not trouble
to set him straight by publishing a reply. From the date of submission of the letter,
I see that you probably had it at hand when I visited you in Baltimore. If you had
shown it to me then, I could have given you some good advice about it. Since you did
not, I shall now say that I think you could be about better business and in better
company.
Yours truly,
Linus Pauling
