Gilbert N. Lewis
Gilbert Newton Lewis was a famous
American physical chemist. Lewis is best known for the 1902 valence bond theory, which he developed in coordination with
Irving Langmuir. His 1923 textbook
Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, written in coordination with Merle Randall is one of the founding books in
chemical thermodynamics. In 1926, Lewis coined the term "
photon" for the smallest unit of radiant energy.
Encyclopedia
Gilbert Newton Lewis was a famous
American physical chemist. Lewis is best known for the 1902 valence bond theory, which he developed in coordination with
Irving Langmuir. His 1923 textbook
Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, written in coordination with Merle Randall is one of the founding books in
chemical thermodynamics. In 1926, Lewis coined the term "
photon" for the smallest unit of radiant energy.
Early life
Lewis was born in
Weymouth, Massachusetts. His father was a
Dartmouth-graduated lawyer and broker. He was a precocious child who learned to read at age three.
His family moved to
Lincoln, Nebraska when he was 9 years-old. He was
homeschooled until age 9. He went to public school from age 9 to 14 and then he went to the
University of Nebraska, and three years later transferred to the Harvard University where he showed an interest in
economics, but concentrated in
chemistry, getting his B.A. in 1896 and his Ph.D. in 1899. His first published work, a study of thermochemical and electrochemical properties of amalgams, was based on his doctoral research and was published in 1898.
Career
After earning his Ph.D., he stayed as an instructor for a year before taking a traveling fellowship, studying under the physical chemist
Wilhelm Ostwald at
Leipzig and
Walther Nernst at
Göttingen. He then returned to Harvard as an instructor for three more years, and in 1904 left to become superintendent of weights and measures for the Bureau of Science of the
Philippine Islands in
Manila. The next year he returned to
Cambridge when the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology appointed him to a faculty position, in which he had a chance to join a group of outstanding physical chemists under the direction of Arthur Amos Noyes. He quickly rose in rank, becoming assistant professor in 1907, associate professor on 1908, and full professor in 1911. He left MIT to become professor of physical chemistry and dean of the College of Chemistry at the
University of California, Berkeley in 1912. Lewis Hall at Berkeley, built in 1948, was named in his honor.
Timeline
In 1908 he published the first of several papers on
relativity, in which he derived the
mass-
energy relationship in a different way from
Albert Einstein's derivation. He also introduced the thermodynamic concept of fugacity in a paper, "The osmotic pressure of concentrated solutions, and the laws of the perfect solution,"
J. Am. Chem. Soc. 30, 668-683 .
On June 21, 1912, he married Mary Hinckley Sheldon, daughter of a Harvard professor of
Romance languages. They had two sons, both of whom became chemistry professors, and a daughter.
In 1913, he was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences, but in 1934 he resigned in a dispute over the internal politics of that institution.
In 1916, he formulated the idea that a
covalent bond consisted of a shared pair of
electrons and defined the term odd molecule when an electron is not shared. His ideas on
chemical bonding were expanded upon by
Irving Langmuir and became the inspiration for the studies on the nature of the chemical bond by
Linus Pauling. This year he published what became known as the
Lewis structure and the
Cubical atom model.
In 1919, by studying the
magnetic properties of solutions of
oxygen in
liquid nitrogen, he found that O
4 molecules were formed. This was the first evidence for tetratomic oxygen.
In 1923, he formulated the electron-pair theory of acid-base reactions. In the so-called
Lewis theory of acids and bases, a "Lewis acid" is an
electron-pair acceptor and a "Lewis base" is an
electron-pair donor. This year he also published his book
Valence and the structure of atoms and molecules.
Based on work by
J. Willard Gibbs, it was known that chemical reactions proceeded to an equilibrium determined by the free energy of the substances taking part. Lewis spent 25 years determining free energies of various substances. In 1923 he and Merle Randall published the results of this study, which helped formalize modern
chemical thermodynamics.
In 1926, he coined the term "
photon" for the smallest unit of radiant energy.
Lewis was the first to produce a pure sample of deuterium oxide in 1933. By accelerating
deuterons in
Ernest O. Lawrence's cyclotron, he was able to study many of the properties of atomic nuclei. During the 1930s, he was faculty advisor and mentor to
Glenn T. Seaborg, who was retained for post-doctoral work as Lewis' personal research assistant before going on to win the 1951
Nobel Prize in Chemistry and have the element Seaborgium named in his honor.
In the last years of his life, he established that
phosphorescence of
organic molecules involves an excited
triplet state and measured the magnetic properties of this triplet state.
During his career he published on many other subjects besides those mentioned in this article, ranging from the nature of
light quanta to the
economics of price stabilization.
He died at age 70 of a heart attack while working in his laboratory in Berkeley. He had been working on an experiment with liquid hydrogen cyanide, and deadly fumes from a broken line were leaking into the laboratory when a graduate student found the professor's lifeless body under a workbench. The coroner said Gilbert N. Lewis died of coronary artery disease; however, some believe that the death may have been a suicide. UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus William Jolly, who reported the various views on Gilbert N. Lewis' death in his 1987 history of University of California, Berkeley’s College of Chemistry,
From Retorts to Lasers, said one higher-up in the department believed the suicide theory.
A possible explanation for the suicide theories was depression following a lunch with
Irving Langmuir. On the day of Gilbert N. Lewis' death, Irving Langmuir and Gilbert N. Lewis met for lunch at the University of California, Berkeley. It was reported by associates that Gilbert N. Lewis came back from the meeting in a dark mood. He reportedly sat down for a morose game of bridge with some colleagues, and then went back to work in his lab. An hour later, Gilbert N. Lewis was dead. Irving Langmuir's papers at the Library of Congress confirm that Irving Langmuir was on the University of California, Berkeley campus that day. Irving Langmuir had gone to the University of California, Berkeley to receive an honorary degree.
External links
- - Chemical Achievers
- - Eric Weisstein's World of Scientific Biography
- - Overview
