The
cubical atom was an early
atomic model in which
electrons were positioned at the eight corners of a cube in a non-polar atom or molecule. This theory was developed in 1902 by
Gilbert N. Lewis and published in 1916 in the article "The Atom and the Molecule" and used to account for the phenomenon of
valency. Lewis's theory was based on
Abegg's rule. It was further developed in 1919 by
Irving Langmuir as the
cubical octet atom. The figure below shows structural representations for elements of the second row of the
periodic table.