Ever since Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz had his apocryphal daydream of the autophagous snake Ouroboros and reasoned that the only way six carbon and six hydrogen atoms could sit comfortably together was in a ring, chemists have been fascinated by the benzene molecule. Until 1865, chemists had struggled to reconcile much of the empirical data in the burgeoning field of organic chemistry, especially where bonding was concerned and most particularly, double bonds between carbon atoms.
However, to this day, the toxic, cancer-causing chemical so critically at the heart of millions of molecules still surprises us.
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