The free space is packed with cubical atoms of energy.

Triple bonds could not be accounted for by the cubical atom model, because there is no way of having two cubes share three corners.

Gilbert N. Lewis develops the cubical atom atomic model.

He included what became known as Lewis dot structures as well as the cubical atom model.

About 1902 Lewis started to use unpublished drawings of cubical atoms in his lecture notes, in which the corners of the cube represented possible electron positions.

This rule was used later in 1916 when Gilbert N. Lewis formulated the "octet rule" in his cubical atom theory.

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.

However, Birge's championing of the Bohr atom led him into conflict with the chemists who defended Lewis' earlier theory of the cubical atom.

Gilbert N. Lewis referred to this insight as Abegg's rule and used it to help formulate his cubical atom model and the "rule of eight", which began to distinguish between valence and valence electrons.

In 1919, Irving Langmuir, borrowed the term to explain Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom model by stating that "the number of pairs of electrons which any given atom shares with the adjacent atoms is called the covalence of that atom."

His most noted publication was the famous 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure".

Gilbert N. Lewis was one of the first to refer to the concept as "Abegg's rule" when he used it as a basis of argument in Gilbert N. Lewis' 1916 famous article "The Atom and the Molecule", to develop his cubical atom theory, which developed into the octet rule.