Background
Lewis was born in 1708, in Richmond, England, the son of John Lewis.
St Aldate's, Oxford OX1 1DP, United Kingdom
Lewis had an early opportunity to observe rudimentary chemical technology. By the time he had spent some five year at Christ Church, Oxford (1725 - March 17, 1730).
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom
Lewis earned first Bachelor of Arts in 1734, then Master of Arts in 1737, Bachelor of Medicine in 1741, and finally Doctor of Medicine in 1745 from Cambridge.
Copley Medal
An eighteenth-century chemical laboratory, from Commercium Philosophico-Technicum by William Lewis.
Lewis was born in 1708, in Richmond, England, the son of John Lewis.
Lewis had an early opportunity to observe rudimentary chemical technology. By the time he had spent some five year at Christ Church, Oxford (1725 - March 17, 1730) and earned first Bachelor of Arts in 1734, then Master of Arts in 1737, Bachelor of Medicine in 1741, and finally Doctor of Medicine in 1745 from Cambridge, he had acquired a definite interest in the chemical arts.
Lewis was giving public lectures in chemistry "with a View to the Improvement of Pharmacy, Trades and the Art itself" at least as early as 1737. Within a few years he had established sufficient reputation to be elected a member of the Royal Society in October 1745, and he remained a part of the London scientific scene for the rest of his life.
Whatever Lewis learned at Newtonian Oxford and Cambridge was supplemented and shaped by later editorial labors on authors less devoted to the mechanical philosophy. His practical bent was nurtured by his 1746 edition of George Wilson’s venerable Compleat Course of Chemistry and by his abridgement in the same year of the Edinburgh Medical Essays. The latter included many articles reflecting the long-term interests of the Edinburgh physicians in the practical chemistry associated with materia medica and mineral waters. Lewis’ own interest in applied chemistry never waned, and, after he moved westward out of London proper to the village of Kingston in 1746, he continued to work on pharmacy and materia medica, gradually expanding his interests to include other areas of chemical technology.
While his broad plan for applied chemistry was thus being formulated, Lewis kept up his pharmaceutical activities. He had agreed to produce a new English pharmacopoeia and, perhaps as preparation for this task, translated the fourth Latin edition of the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia and published it in 1748.
One of the most significant events in Lewis’ life occurred in 1750, when he began his lifelong association with Alexander Chisholm. Searching for an intelligent and educated assistant for his numerous projects, Lewis found one, appropriately enough, in a London bookstore. Their careers, until Lewis’ death, were inseparably entwined; to speak of one is to speak of the other. Chisholm, who in 1743 had graduated M.A. from Marischal College, Aberdeen, was an able linguist, competent in Latin and Greek and in the German and Swedish vernaculars. Indeed, it is believed that the translation of Caspar Neumann’s chemical lectures was done by Chisholm.
Lewis’ long-standing interest in materia medica and his studies of previous works in pharmacy, including his translation of the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia, culminated in 1753 with was publication of The New Dispensatory, which was based on Quincy’s Complete English Dispensatory. Careful and systematic, like all of Lewis’ works, the New Dispensatory was highly praised by that archcritic William Cullen as the only English pharmacopoeia that “made any improvement on the Materia Medica….” The work went through many editions before and after Lewis’ death, and its spirit was retained in the form and arrangement of Andrew Duncan’s Edinburgh New Dispensatory (1803), which survived well into the nineteenth century.
Perhaps no work better shows Lewis’ abilities as an experimentalist than his series of researches on platinum during the 1750’s. Although others had attacked this intractable metal before him, using a number of standard metallurgical techniques, Lewis succeeded where others had failed through his careful systematic approach and the clever use of chemical analogy. Well-versed in the trends of his time, Lewis quickly turned to acids to get the metal into solution. Noting certain similarities between platinum and gold, Lewis defined the new metal in terms of an old one whose chemistry was relatively well understood. In his knowledge of solution chemistry and his ability to employ it imaginatively, Lewis showed himself to be in the forefront of eighteenth-century experimental chemistry. For this effort and for his already substantial contributions to pharmacy and materia medica Lewis was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1754.
Attracted by the empiricism bias of the work of the German chemist and apothecary Caspar Neumann, Lewis published in 1759 a translation with both additions and abridgments of Neumann’s chemical lectures. Neumann’s approach presents a strong contrast to George Wilson’s stark collection of recipes; for the former, although cautious as a theoretician, was a follower of Georg Ernst Stahl, and thus his work employed the complex of ideas associated with the “inflammable principle” - phologiston.
Certainly Lewis’ most ambitious work was the Commercium philosophico-technicum, which appeared in sections over the period 1763-1765. He divided the book into seven topics that by no means form a complete survey of chemical technology of this period. The topics included such diverse headings as the chemistry of gold, vitrification, expansion and contraction of bodies with change in temperature, blowing air into furnaces by the force of falling water, methods of producing the color black, and a summation of Lewis’ studies on platinum. While these topics differed widely in their immediate applicability to technology, as a group they demonstrated forcefully the possibility of relating chemical knowledge to a wide variety of industrial problems.
That Lewis' plan for a broadly based attack on problems in applied chemistry was formed fairly early is suggested by his published pamphlet of 1748 proposing a periodical entitled commercium philosophicotechnicum. As planned, this new publication was to examine various manufacturing processes systematically, through laboratory studies where necessary, and to eliminate wasteful procedures and products. Lewis was far from alone in these interests. Many men of commerce and learning felt the need for the practical improvements in the arts that were promised but never delivered by the enthusiasts of the new mechanical philosophy. Indeed, this period saw the rise of several groups interested in such improvements, notably the Royal Society of Arts (founded 1754) and the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Lewis himself had a broad circle of acquaintances with similar outlooks, and he availed himself of their opinions of his projects on a number of recorded occasions.
In his later works, and particularly in the highly empirical Commercium philosophicotechnicum, he eschewed a simple empirical approach - such as descriptions of manufactures or histories of processes - for one that was based on the “invariable properties of matter.” What Lewis avoided was a dependence on the sterile mechanical philosophy that promised so much and produced so little in chemistry.
Although Lewis was prolific, his general way of working was slow and methodical. He read extensively, took notes and made additions to them from his own experience, and even conducted new experiments to confirm or deny the claims of others. But it must not be assumed that his only virtue was his systematic methodology. His skepticism about the “mechanical philosophy” was in itself a philosophical position, one which was shared by a substantial number of his contemporaries.
Nothing is known of Lewis' family.