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Born in Darmstadt, Grand Dutchy of Hesse to a civil servant.
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Graduated from secondary school and entered the University of Giessen with the intentions to study architecture. But, soon changed to chemistry after hearing the lectures of Justus von Liebig.
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Following his education in Giessen, he took postdoctoral fellowships in Paris (1851-52), in Chur Switzerland (1852-53), and in London (1853-55), where he was influenced by Alexander Williamson.
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Kekulé became Privatdozent (private lecturer) at the University of Heidelberg.
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This theory proceeds from the idea of atomic valence, especially the tetravalence of carbon (which Kekulé announced late in 1857) and the ability of carbon atoms to link to each other (announced in a paper published in May 1858), to the determination of the bonding order of all of the atoms in a molecule.
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He was hired as full professor at the University of Ghent.
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Kekulé published a paper in French, suggesting that the structure contained a six-membered ring of carbon atoms with alternating single and double bonds.
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He was called to Bonn, where he remained for the rest of his career.
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Since ortho derivatives of benzene were never actually found in more than one isomeric form, Kekulé modified his proposal and suggested that the benzene molecule oscillates between two equivalent structures, in such a way that the single and double bonds continually interchange positions.
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The new understanding of benzene, and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé's honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper.
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He died in Bonn, Germany.
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Of the first five Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, his students won three: van't Hoff in 1901, Fischer in 1902 and Baeyer in 1905.
