Chemist. He received recognition for his discovery of the Benzene Ring, a self-linking of carbon atoms. Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz's ancestry dates back to a Bohemian noble family. His family was of the upper-middle class, who were civil servants. After his secondary education, he studied architecture at the University of Giessen. Under the influence of Justus von Liebig, he decided to study chemistry. He earned his doctorate degree in 1852. Postdoctoral research led him to Paris, Chur in Switzerland and London. In 1856 he became Privatdozent, or a lecturer, in Heidelberg. He had mastered the German language as well as English and French, which was used in lecturing. From 1858 to 1867 he held the Chairmen of Ordinary Professor of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry at Ghent University in Belgium, lecturing in French. He played a part in the "Couper Incident" that happened at the University of Paris between Professor Charles A. Wurtz and the young student, Archibald Couper with presenting his paper, "New Chemical Theory." Couper's paper was delayed for about two months and was finally seen by the French Academy being published on June 14, 1858. This procrastination in publishing resulted in Kekule's paper on linking atoms being printed first in May of 1858, thus receiving the credit for the noteworthy find. Both researchers had worked independent of each other. Later, Wurtz and Kekulé were part of initiating the first conference of the International Chemical Congress at Karlsruhe Institute in Germany. With his studies of unsaturated compounds, organic diacids, and aromatic derivatives, he published numerous noteworthy papers during his long career, but one of the most important was the one in May of 1858. Starting in 1859, he started his first installment of a four-volume text, "Textbook of Organic Chemistry." Toward the end of his career, he moved to Bonn with a position at the renowned Chemisches Institute. In 1895, a year before his death, he was ennobled by Kaiser Guillaume II, adopted the title von Stradonitz. The title was taken from Stradonice in Bohemia, where his family owned land. In his private life, his wife died with the birth of their first child, and a second marriage proved to be unhappy.