Abstract
IN connexion with the benzene centenary, it may perhaps be pointed out that the name Kekulé is not French. August Kekulé, born in Darmstadt (1829; he died in Bonn, 1896), was a descendant of Wilhelm Dionysius Kekule (or Keckhule) von Stradonitz, who came from Bohemia in the seventeenth century. The é was probably adopted to guard against the suppression of the final e; that has been done in other cases. August Kekulé himself spelt his name with é even in his earliest papers, before he went to Ghent and Bonn, and still in 1890, when his researches on the construction of aromatic compounds and the twenty-fifth anniversary of his benzene-hexagon (Bonn, 1865) were commemorated by an international Kekulé celebration at Berlin. But he had by that time (1890) resumed the full name A. K. von Stradonitz. The present members of the family spell their name without the accent.
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BORNS, H. The Faraday Benzene Centenary and Kekulé. Nature 116, 48 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116048d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116048d0
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