Background

Gilbert Newton Lewis was born on October 23, 1875, in Weymouth, Massachusetts, United States. He was a son of Frank Wesley Lewis, a lawyer, and Mary Burr (White) Lewis.

Gilbert had a sister named Mary Hammett and a brother Roger Labaree.

Education

Gilbert Newton Lewis’ early education was informal and private. He learned to read at the age of three at home and was educated by his parents until the age of thirteen, when the family relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska. While there, Gilbert enrolled in a preparatory school affiliated with the University of Nebraska where he received his formal education in 1889.

After four subsequent years that he spent at the University, Lewis moved to Harvard University where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1896. The same year, he came to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts where he taught till 1898. Then, the scientist came back to Harvard and completed his master’s degree. It was followed by a Doctor of Philosophy which he received with a dissertation on electrochemical potentials written under the tutelage of Theodore William Richards.

From 1900 to 1901, Gilbert Newton Lewis lived in Leipzig, Germany. Along with W. Nernst at Göttingen and W. Ostwald, he studied at the center of physical chemistry.

Later, Lewis obtained four Honorary Doctor of Science degrees during the 1920s, in particular, from the University of Liverpool, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1934, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Complutense University of Madrid.

Career

The start of Gilbert Newton Lewis’ career can be counted from his instructorship at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts that he completed at the end of the 1890s. In 1901, Lewis joined the professors' staff of the Harvard University in the same capacity and taught thermodynamics and electrochemistry till 1904. This year, he made a pause in academics to work for a while as a Superintendent of Weights and Measures at the Bureau of Science in Manila, Philippines. It was during these years that Lewis began thinking about many of his most important contributions to chemical theory. After a year of researches in Germany where he made the acquaintance of Albert Einstein, the scientist came back to the United States and was named an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the research group of chemist Arthur Amos Noyes, he reached full professor status, becoming acting director of research in 1910, a remarkable achievement in such a short period of time.

In 1912, Gilbert N. Lewis moved to California to take the position of dean in the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for the rest of his working life, except for a distinguished tour of duty with the Army Chemical Warfare Service in France in a capacity of major during World War I. After joining the service in winter of 1918, Lewis established there the Gas Defense School to teach gas officers. On his return to the United States in autumn of the same year, he was decorated for his activity.

While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the scientist began meticulous work measuring the free energy values associated with several chemical processes, both organic and inorganic. Between 1913 and 1923, he and his frequent collaborator Merle Randall published several papers and a book on free energy, in which they summarized virtually all the known data on the subject. Lewis also showed how this free energy data could be applied to many different problems in chemistry. For example, he formulated the concept of activity, which, because it relied on thermodynamic principles in addition to chemical concentration, better explained the behavior of reactions occurring in the solution.

By the time Lewis began thinking about chemical bonding, the electron had been discovered and was believed to participate in bonding. The periodic table was largely laid out, and repeating properties had been observed to occur every eight elements. Several different ideas had been advanced to explain how atoms hooked together to make molecules, but none of them were entirely satisfactory. Lewis had been thinking about the relationship between the eight-membered rows on the periodic table in relation to the number of electrons for some time, but it was not until 1916 that he formally proposed his theory of bonding in his classic paper titled ‘The Atom and the Molecule’.

No one took this theory seriously when the scientist first proposed it, but in 1919 the noted chemist Irving Langmuir further developed Lewis’ idea about an octet of electrons conferring the greatest stability. Langmuir was more persistent and articulate in convincing the chemical community that the theory was important, and so it was for a time called the Lewis-Langmuir electron dot theory. In 1923, Lewis published a book on the theory, ‘Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules’. The volume was followed by another work co-authored with Lewis’ lifelong colleague Merle Randall entitled ‘Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances’.

In the book on valence, Lewis had successfully applied his chemical bonding theory to acids and bases, but once again it had received little notice. At that time, chemists thought that acids must have a hydrogen ion to donate and that a base must be able to receive a hydrogen ion. They were at a loss, however, to explain acidic behavior in compounds that possessed no donatable hydrogen. In 1938, Lewis read a lecture at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in which he insisted that this obstacle could be removed by defining an acid as any electron-pair recipient and a base as any electron-pair donor. These definitions cover almost all chemicals in any faction, including hydrogen ion transfers, and are well used today.

In 1933, after a decade of frustration in his areas of interest, Gilbert Newton Lewis abruptly started working on a completely new subject, isotope separation. Working with the isotopes of hydrogen, the chemist managed to prepare nearly pure water containing only the deuterium isotope of hydrogen. This is the so-called ‘heavy water’ important in nuclear reaction research. This was his major contribution to this area, however; Lewis’ subsequent investigations on isotopes were largely unsuccessful.

The last years of his life found Lewis engaged in the study of photochemistry – the interaction of light energy with chemical compounds to cause reactions. In addition to his other areas of interest, Lewis was interested to investigate light and color early in his career but his most solid published work on the topic appeared later. He collaborated with the respected chemist Melvin Calvin on a review paper concerning photochemistry and then experimented in the areas of fluorescence and phosphorescence. Eventually, he began to connect these experiments with the rapidly developing field of quantum mechanics, once again combining theory and practice as he had done with thermodynamics and chemical reactions decades earlier. Lewis’ interests outside of chemistry included economics and prehistoric glaciation in the Americas. His last paper, published posthumously, concerned the thermodynamics of ice ages. The scientist continued his researches until his death.

Achievements

• Gilbert Newton Lewis is considered as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century who pioneered in both chemistry and physics.
  
  Lewis’ ideas about chemical bonding are still among the first theories taught to beginning chemistry students. When Lewis began his career, theories of energy and energy flow were almost never applied to practical chemical problems. His efforts made considerable progress toward finding ways of integrating thermodynamic principles into real chemical systems. Lewis helped to revolutionize chemical education in the United States, making it more investigative and analytical rather than simply descriptive.
  
  Nearly pure water containing only the deuterium isotope of hydrogen, also known as ‘heavy water’, that he managed to prepare is also one of his major contributions to an area of nuclear researches. Huge is A cornerstone of thermodynamics, a quantity called free energy, a mathematical combination of several energy-related characteristics of a system. Until Lewis began working in the area, however, the theory was entirely mathematical; very little actual measured data existed to enable practical calculation of this important quantity for real reactions.
  
  While at the University of California, Berkeley, both as a professor and dean of the College of Chemistry, Lewis redesigned the chemistry curriculum to include the teaching of thermodynamic principles and transformed Berkeley into one of the world's most important centers for chemistry.
  
  In order to attract more students to the discipline, Lewis paid particular attention to the education of first-year students, involving them in research early in their studies. He gave his colleagues great freedom of choice in their research projects and insisted on a broad base of chemical knowledge rather than rigid specialization. He encouraged discussion and debate among all of his colleagues and students (an unusual practice at that time), demanded that the university provide adequate money for facilities and equipment, and gradually built one of the best chemistry programs in the world. Nearly three hundred Ph.D. degrees in chemistry were awarded at Berkeley during Lewis’ tenure, and several of the department’s graduate students, including Glenn Seaborg, Willard Libby, and Melvin Calvin, eventually won Nobel Prizes.
  
  As to the scientist himself, Lewis never won the Nobel Prize although he was nominated for it 41 times. Nevertheless, his contributions to chemistry and physics were marked by such awards as Willard Gibbs Award, Davy Medal, Theodore William Richards Medal, and Arrhenius Medal. He was also a recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal for his activity at Army Chemical Warfare Service in France during the First World War. The French Government made him the Knight of the Legion of Honour.
  
  To celebrate the chemist’s contributions to the University, one of the Berkeley campuses built in 1948 was named after the scientist. There are also G.N. Lewis Way, a street in Weymouth, Massachusetts. The wing of the new Weymouth High School Chemistry department has been named in Lewis honor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Anatomy of Science

    ("To such people, who are interested not so much in the pr...)

    1926
  • Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances

    (The book is co-authored by Gilbert Newton Lewis and Merle...)

    1923
  • Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules 1923
  • Autocatalytic Decomposition of Silver Oxide, and Hydration in Solution

Views

Quotations: "A detective with his murder mystery, a chemist seeking the structure of a new compound, use little of the formal and logical modes of reasoning. Through a series of intuitions, surmises, fancies, they stumble upon the right explanation, and have a knack of seizing it when it once comes within reach."

"There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance."

"The scientist is a practical man and his are practical (i.e., practically attainable) aims. He does not seek the ultimate but the proximate. He does not speak of the last analysis but rather of the next approximation. His are not those beautiful structures so delicately designed that a single flaw may cause the collapse of the whole. The scientist builds slowly and with a gross but solid kind of masonry. If dissatisfied with any of his work, even if it be near the very foundations, he can replace that part without damage to the remainder."

"In the snobbery of science, each branch attempts to rise in the social scale by imitating the methods of the next higher science and by ignoring the methods and phenomena of the sciences beneath."

"It must be admitted that science has its castes. The man whose chief apparatus is the differential equation looks down upon one who uses a galvanometer, and he in turn upon those who putter about with sticky and smelly things in test tubes."

"Sometimes I think that our laboratories are but little earthworks which men build about themselves, and whose puny tops too often conceal from view the Olympian heights; that we who work in these laboratories are but skilled artisans compared with the man who is able to observe and to draw accurate deductions from the world about him."

Membership

Gilbert Newton Lewis was a member of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Chemistry Society, the American Physics Society, the Danish Academy, and the Franklin Institute.

In 1913, while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the professional chemistry fraternity, the Alpha Chi Sigma.

Personality

While teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Gilbert N. Lewis established himself as a motivating force for both researchers and students. Although too nervous in front of large groups to teach much himself, he influenced the entire process of chemical education.

Lewis had a lifelong conflict with Walther Nerns who was one of his teachers during his studies in Leipzig, Germany. Lewis missed no opportunity to criticize the work of his former tutor. For example, he called Nernst's heat theorem “a regrettable episode in the history of chemistry”. Nernst, in his turn, created obstacles for Lewis to receive the Nobel Prize through one of his friends, Wilhelm Palmær who was a member of the Nobel Chemistry Committee.

Another confrontation in Gilbert N. Lewis’ life was the rivalry with Irving Langmuir based on the Langmuir's extensions of Lewis' theory of the chemical bond. The Nobel Prize for the work on surface chemistry attributed to Langmuir aggravated the situation taking into consideration the repeated failure of Lewis. Some witnesses of the situation named the meeting of Langmuir and Lewis as the possible cause of Lewis’ mystery death believing it was a suicide. According to the official line, the scientist died of a heart attack caused by the coronary artery disease.

Connections

Gilbert Newton Lewis married Mary Hinckley Sheldon on June 21, 1912. She was the daughter of a professor of Harvard who taught Romance languages. The family produced two sons Edward Sheldon, Richard Newton, and one daughter, Margery Selby.

All of them followed their father’s steps and chose professions associated with chemistry.

Father:

Frank Wesley Lewis

Mother:

Mary Burr Lewis

Spouse:

Mary Hinckley Sheldon

Son:

Edward Sheldon Lewis

Daughter:

Margery Lewis Selby

Son:

Richard Newton Lewis

colleague:

Merle Randall

colleague:

Melvin Calvin

Acquaintance:

Albert Einstein