How did Lewis create his acids and bases model?
1 Answer
It came from his long interest in how electrons are involved in bonding.
Early in his career, in 1902, Lewis had been interested in the role of the recently-discovered electron in chemical bonding.
In 1913 he proposed that there were two different kinds of bond: a "polar" bond formed by electron transfer, as in Na⁺ Cl⁻, and a "nonpolar" bond that did not involve electron transfer.
In 1916 he proposed that a chemical bond consists of a shared pair of electrons.
In 1923 he redefined an acid as any atom or molecule that could accept an electron pair. A base was an electron pair donor.
His idea of a base was widely accepted. But most chemists still believed in the then-current theory of acids as proton donors.
Chemists did not accept the concept of a Lewis acid until he gave a brilliant paper fifteen years later.
