recently a very famous British chemist
Ken Wade Kenneth Wade of the University
of Durham died and he was also began his
career here at the University of
Nottingham he was an undergraduate here
and a research student and I found his
undergraduate record card here it gives
his name and so on on the front and on
the back it has his photo and it's quite
an interesting thought if your student
now watching this video that in 70 years
time or 60 years time when you finish
your career somebody may be looking at
your record cards and finding out what
you were like when you were young ken
Wade was an inorganic chemist who spent
most of his life working on the element
boron and he is one of the few chemists
that I know that has actually got his
name into the literature there are few
people who get their names on elements
Boreum roentgenium and so on but that
only happens after people are dead
ken Wade has his name associated with a
set of rules that explained the shapes
of a whole series of boron compounds Ken
Wade
came up with this his theory which is
which he called polyhedral skeletal
electron pair theory but we tend to call
them my 10s come to my second years I
call them Wade's rules there are so many
compounds in chemistry there's often
very confusing why does this one have
that shape why does that one have a
different shape Ken produced a set of
rules that explained why a particular
type of boron compound adopted certain
shapes they allow us to predict the
structures of these things called
borings these boron hydride compounds
and so this is kind of like the the
first one so this is this is diborane
we've got these boron atoms here in
black and then we got these bridging
hydride so we've got two of those okay
and we've got four terminal hydrides so
it's like three
I show you we've almost got to be h3 s
kind of coming together okay
and they can make bigger stretches like
this which is tetraborate he came to
this university in 1950 he was an
undergraduate here from 1951 to 1954 so
he finished as an undergraduate sixty
years ago so it tells you the subjects
that he studied in school it also tells
you the name of his tutor who was the
famous explosives lecturer BD Shaw and
on the back he's a rather fine photo of
him he looked quite serious students
wore ties in those days and over here it
has his marks and over here in the final
year you can see they marked with Greek
letters Alpha was good then beaten not
so good and gamma was terrible and here
he got beta for organic chemistry alpha
minus for inorganic chemistry
and for physical he got beta query plus
I'm no idea what that means really means
I think that the staff could put
whatever number they like to this and
over here it says that he did research
with dr. Greenwoods and then after that
he went to the University of Durham and
he spent most of his career in the
University of Durham which is in the
northeast of England not far from
Newcastle where I worked early on in my
career and that's how I got to know Ken
and he was an absolutely wonderful
person in terms of supporting younger
researchers like me so basically what
what they do is they given the the
shapes that they adopt so what you do is
you add up you take your pH unit and any
other hydrides that are left over and
you add them up in each pH unit gives
you two electrons to hold your cluster
together okay and if we have missing
vertices that leads to open structures
so we have close so if they're all
closed nado which means nest I think
that's like kind of slightly open then
Konoe which is more open again which i
think comes from like spider like cobweb
and and so on the nice thing about wage
rolls is by using this other theory
called isolobal theory we can
interchange things like CH so
carbon-hydrogen units for BHS and make
carburetor mix boron carbon things and
we can also use it for putting metals in
instead so metal fragments can go in
there metallo borings so Wade rules
covers a lot of a lot of areas of main
group chemistry certainly we also have
his PhD thesis here you can see the
title addition compounds of Bron tri
chloride and gallium tri chloride if I
can summarize his thesis rather simply
boron trichloride
is a molecule with boron here and three
chlorines and it's a flat molecule a
planar molecule and it doesn't boron
does not have as many electrons as one
would like for a stable compound it's
so-called electron deficient so it will
react with compounds like ammonia
that have spare electrons so the ammonia
here with a pair of electrons shown by
the silver paper can interact with the
boron to make a complex this is what he
studied and you end up with a sort of
complex like this
we have boron here and ammonia here and
it squeaks well you didn't really sweep
but you get the idea
so if we look in the thesis you can see
it was last borrowed from the library in
the 27th of November 1973 and it was
then taken out for this video by my
colleague Sam Tang on the 31st of March
2014 so as far as we can see nobody has
read this book for more than 40 years
it's not really sad because all the
important results would have been
published in papers so this is more of
the details what is interesting about
this that of course the thesis was typed
by hand there were no electric
typewriters no computers
and the diagrams were drawn by hand and
actually pasted in
of course you needed several copies of
your thesis so you had to type it with a
so-called piece of carbon paper like
this would you put between two sheets of
paper and then when you typed if you
type very hard you could write something
like boron trichloride and all being
well it will come out underneath often
not very bright this is the top copy of
the thesis which had to go into the
library and the carbon copies were given
out to the supervisor and probably
another copy to his parents because most
students give a thesis to their parents
that's why we can copy our emails yes
the interesting thing about Ken was that
he began his career as an experimental
chemist but then later on in his career
he became more of a theoretician this
type of theoretical chemistry is
extremely valuable because it enables
chemists doing their experiments to
understand their results