KIRKINTILLOCH

KIRKINTILLOCH is a small town situated some 6 miles northeast of Glasgow on the Forth and Clyde Canal. In earlier times it was a centre of coalmining and metal founding industries, but most of the heavy industry has departed, and it now serves a dormitory suburb of Glasgow. The remains of a fort on the Antonine Wall built by the Romans are in the town.

Kirkintilloch has two claims to fame:-

Firstly, until recently it was a "dry" town; there were no premises licensed to sell alcoholic drinks, a situation immortalised in the song sung by the folk group called The Corries:-

The real reason for the absence of pubs was more prosaic, it was the miners' wives who got the local licensing board to ban them!

The second claim to fame of Kirkintilloch, more important in the present context of chemical structures, is as the place of birth (in 1831) of Archibald Scott Couper. It is now accepted that he was the chemist who first recognised the quadrivalency of carbon, and was probably the first chemist to use structural formulae in the way they are used today. By a little stretch of the imagination Couper could be considered to be the founder of Molecular Modelling!!
The house where Couper was born still exists on the east side of the main street (Townhead) just a few doors south of the old police station. It is marked by a commemorative plaque above the door, placed there by the citizens of Kirkintilloch on the centenary of his birth.

For more information on Couper see the article by Alfred Bader in Chemistry in Britain, 1996, 32, part 9 (September), p.40.

A more detailed evaluation of Couper's use of structural formulae is contained in an article by Wilfred V. Farrar and Kathleen R. Farrar, Proc. Chem. Soc., 1959, p. 285.

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Revised 18th June 2007.