G. N. Lewis was born in 1875 inWeymouth, Massachusetts. After receiving hisPhD inchemistry fromHarvard University and studying abroad in Germany and thePhilippines, Lewis moved toCalifornia in 1912 to teach chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became the dean of the college of chemistry and spent the rest of his life.[3][11] As a professor, he incorporated thermodynamic principles into the chemistry curriculum and reformedchemical thermodynamics in a mathematically rigorous manner accessible to ordinary chemists. He began measuring thefree energy values related to several chemical processes, both organic and inorganic. In 1916, he also proposed his theory of bonding and added information about electrons in theperiodic table of thechemical elements. In 1933, he started his research on isotope separation. Lewis worked with hydrogen and managed to purify a sample ofheavy water. He then came up with his theory of acids and bases, and did work inphotochemistry during the last years of his life.
Though he was nominated 41 times, G. N. Lewis never won theNobel Prize in Chemistry, resulting in a majorNobel Prize controversy.[12][4][13][9][14] On the other hand, Lewis mentored and influenced numerous Nobel laureates at Berkeley includingHarold Urey (1934 Nobel Prize),William F. Giauque (1949 Nobel Prize),Glenn T. Seaborg (1951 Nobel Prize),Willard Libby (1960 Nobel Prize),Melvin Calvin (1961 Nobel Prize) and so on, turning Berkeley into one of the world's most prestigious centers for chemistry.[15][16][17][18][19] On March 23, 1946, Lewis was found dead in his Berkeley laboratory where he had been working withhydrogen cyanide; many postulated that the cause of his death was suicide.[13] After Lewis' death, his children followed their father's career in chemistry, and the Lewis Hall on the Berkeley campus is named after him.[11]
Lewis was born in 1875 and raised inWeymouth, Massachusetts, where there exists a street named for him, G.N. Lewis Way, off Summer Street. Additionally, the wing of the new Weymouth High School Chemistry department has been named in his honor. Lewis received his primary education at home from his parents, Frank Wesley Lewis, a lawyer of independent character, and Mary Burr White Lewis. He read at age three and was intellectually precocious. In 1884 his family moved toLincoln, Nebraska, and in 1889 he received his first formal education at the university preparatory school.
In 1893, after two years at theUniversity of Nebraska, Lewis transferred toHarvard University, where he obtained hisB.S. in 1896. After a year of teaching atPhillips Academy inAndover, Lewis returned to Harvard to study with the physical chemistT. W. Richards and obtained his Ph.D. in 1899 with a dissertation onelectrochemical potentials.[20][21] After a year of teaching at Harvard, Lewis took a traveling fellowship to Germany, the center ofphysical chemistry, and studied withWalther Nernst atGöttingen and withWilhelm Ostwald atLeipzig.[22] While working in Nernst's lab, Lewis apparently developed a lifelong enmity with Nernst. In the following years, Lewis started to criticize and denounce his former teacher on many occasions, calling Nernst's work on his heat theorem "a regrettable episode in the history of chemistry".[23] ASwedish friend of Nernst's,Wilhelm Palmær, was a member of the Nobel Chemistry Committee. There is evidence that he used the Nobel nominating and reporting procedures to block aNobel Prize for Lewis inthermodynamics by nominating Lewis for the prize three times, and then using his position as a committee member to write negative reports.[24]
After his stay in Nernst's lab, Lewis returned to Harvard in 1901 as an instructor for three more years. He was appointed instructor inthermodynamics andelectrochemistry. In 1904, Lewis was granted a leave of absence and became Superintendent of Weights and Measures for the Bureau of Science inManila,Philippines. The next year he returned toCambridge, Massachusetts when theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) appointed him to a faculty position, in which he had a chance to join a group of outstanding physical chemists under the direction ofArthur Amos Noyes. He became an assistant professor in 1907, associate professor in 1908, and full professor in 1911.[citation needed]
G. N. Lewis left MIT in 1912 to become a professor of physical chemistry and dean of theCollege of Chemistry at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.[9][15] On June 21, 1912, he married Mary Hinckley Sheldon, daughter of a Harvard professor ofRomance languages. They had two sons, both of whom became chemistry professors, and a daughter. In 1913, he joined theAlpha Chi Sigma at Berkeley, the professional chemistry fraternity.[25]
Lewis' graduate advisees at Berkeley went on to be exceptionally successful with theNobel Committee. 14Nobel prizes were eventually awarded to the men he took as students.[26] The best-known of these includeHarold Urey (1934 Nobel Prize),William F. Giauque (1949 Nobel Prize),Glenn T. Seaborg (1951 Nobel Prize),Willard Libby (1960 Nobel Prize),Melvin Calvin (1961 Nobel Prize).[15][16][17] Due to his efforts, the college of chemistry at Berkeley became one of the top chemistry centers in the world.[15][18]
While at Berkeley he also refused entry to women, including preventingMargaret Melhase from conducting graduate studies.[27][28] Melhase had previously co-discoveredCesium-137 with Seaborg as an undergraduate. In 1913, he was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences.[29] He was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1918.[30] He resigned in 1934, refusing to state the cause for his resignation; it has been speculated that it was due to a dispute over the internal politics of that institution or to the failure of those he had nominated to be elected. His decision to resign may also have been sparked by his resentment over the award of the 1934 Nobel Prize for chemistry to his student,Harold Urey, for his 1931 isolation ofdeuterium and the confirmation of itsspectrum. This was a prize Lewis almost certainly felt he should have shared for his efforts to purify and characterizeheavy water.[31]
On 23 March 1946,[32] a graduate student found Lewis's lifeless body under a laboratory workbench at Berkeley. Lewis had been working on an experiment with liquidhydrogen cyanide, and deadly fumes from a broken line had leaked into the laboratory. The coroner ruled that the cause of death wascoronary artery disease, because of a lack of any signs ofcyanosis,[33] but some believe that it may have been a suicide. Berkeley Emeritus Professor William Jolly, who reported the various views on Lewis's death in his 1987 history of UC Berkeley's College of Chemistry,From Retorts to Lasers, wrote that a higher-up in the department believed that Lewis had committed suicide.[13]
If Lewis's death was indeed a suicide, a possible explanation was depression brought on by a lunch withIrving Langmuir. Langmuir and Lewis had a long rivalry, dating back to Langmuir's extensions of Lewis's theory of the chemical bond. Langmuir had been awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work onsurface chemistry, while Lewis had not received the Prize despite having been nominated 41 times.[12] On the day of Lewis's death, Langmuir and Lewis had met for lunch at Berkeley, a meeting that Michael Kasha recalled only years later.[33] Associates reported that Lewis came back from lunch in a dark mood, played a morose game of bridge with some colleagues, then went back to work in his lab. An hour later, he was found dead. Langmuir's papers at theLibrary of Congress confirm that he had been on the Berkeley campus that day to receive an honorary degree.
Lewis Hall at Berkeley, built in 1948, is named in his honor.[11]
Most of Lewis’ lasting interests originated during his Harvard years. The most important was thermodynamics, a subject in which Lewis was very active at that time. Although most of the important thermodynamic relations were known by 1895, they were seen as isolated equations, and had not yet been rationalized as a logical system, from which, given one relation, the rest could be derived. Moreover, these relations were inexact, applying only to ideal chemical systems. These were two outstanding problems of theoretical thermodynamics. In two long and ambitious theoretical papers in 1900 and 1901, Lewis tried to provide a solution. Lewis introduced the thermodynamic concept ofactivity and coined the term "fugacity".[34][35][36] His new idea of fugacity, or "escaping tendency",[37] was a function with the dimensions ofpressure which expressed the tendency of a substance to pass from one chemical phase to another. Lewis believed that fugacity was the fundamental principle from which a system of real thermodynamic relations could be derived. This hope was not realized, though fugacity did find a lasting place in the description of real gases.
Lewis’ early papers also reveal an unusually advanced awareness ofJ. W. Gibbs's andP. Duhem's ideas of free energy andthermodynamic potential. These ideas were well known to physicists and mathematicians, but not to most practical chemists, who regarded them as abstruse and inapplicable to chemical systems. Most chemists relied on the familiar thermodynamics of heat (enthalpy) ofBerthelot,Ostwald, andVan ’t Hoff, and thecalorimetric school. Heat of reaction is not, of course, a measure of the tendency of chemical changes to occur, and Lewis realized that only free energy and entropy could provide an exact chemical thermodynamics. He derived free energy from fugacity; he tried, without success, to obtain an exact expression for theentropy function, which in 1901 had not been defined at low temperatures. Richards too tried and failed, and not until Nernst succeeded in 1907 was it possible to calculate entropies unambiguously. Although Lewis’ fugacity-based system did not last, his early interest infree energy and entropy proved most fruitful, and much of his career was devoted to making these useful concepts accessible to practical chemists.
At Harvard, Lewis also wrote a theoretical paper on the thermodynamics ofblackbody radiation in which he postulated that light has a pressure. He later revealed that he had been discouraged from pursuing this idea by his older, more conservative colleagues, who were unaware thatWilhelm Wien and others were successfully pursuing the same line of thought. Lewis’ paper remained unpublished; but his interest in radiation andquantum theory, and (later) inrelativity, sprang from this early, aborted effort. From the start of his career, Lewis regarded himself as both chemist and physicist.
About 1902 Lewis started to use unpublished drawings ofcubical atoms in his lecture notes, in which the corners of the cube represented possibleelectron positions. Lewis later cited these notes in his classic 1916 paper on chemical bonding, as being the first expression of his ideas.
A third major interest that originated during Lewis’ Harvard years was his valence theory. In 1902, while trying to explain the laws of valence to his students, Lewis conceived the idea that atoms were built up of a concentric series of cubes with electrons at each corner. This “cubic atom” explained the cycle of eight elements in the periodic table and was in accord with the widely accepted belief that chemical bonds were formed by transfer of electrons to give each atom a complete set of eight. This electrochemical theory of valence found its most elaborate expression in the work ofRichard Abegg in 1904,[38] but Lewis’ version of this theory was the only one to be embodied in a concrete atomic model. Again Lewis’ theory did not interest his Harvard mentors, who, like most American chemists of that time, had no taste for such speculation. Lewis did not publish his theory of the cubic atom, but in 1916 it became an important part of his theory of the shared electron pair bond.
In 1916, he published his classic paper on chemical bonding "The Atom and the Molecule"[39] in which he formulated the idea of what would become known as thecovalent bond, consisting of ashared pair of electrons, and he defined the term odd molecule (the modern term isfree radical) when an electron is not shared. He included what became known asLewis dot structures as well as thecubical atom model. These ideas onchemical bonding were expanded upon byIrving Langmuir and became the inspiration for the studies on the nature of the chemical bond byLinus Pauling.
In 1923, he formulated the electron-pair theory ofacid–base reactions. In this theory ofacids andbases, a "Lewis acid" is anelectron-pair acceptor and a "Lewis base" is anelectron-pair donor.[40] This year he also published a monograph on his theories of the chemical bond.[41]
Based on work byJ. Willard Gibbs, it was known that chemical reactions proceeded to anequilibrium determined by thefree energy of the substances taking part. Lewis spent 25 years determining free energies of various substances. In 1923 he andMerle Randall published the results of this study,[42] which helped formalize modernchemical thermodynamics.
Lewis was the first to produce a pure sample of deuterium oxide (heavy water) in 1933[43] and the first to study survival and growth of life forms in heavy water.[44][45] By acceleratingdeuterons (deuteriumnuclei) inErnest O. Lawrence'scyclotron, he was able to study many of the properties of atomic nuclei.[46] During the 1930s, he was mentor toGlenn T. Seaborg, who was retained for post-doctoral work as Lewis' personal research assistant. Seaborg went on to win the 1951Nobel Prize in Chemistry and have the elementseaborgium named in his honor while he was still alive.
In 1926, he coined the term "photon" for the smallest unit of radiant energy (light). Actually, the outcome of his letter toNature was not what he had intended.[51] In the letter, he proposed a photon being a structural element, notenergy. He insisted on the need for a new variable,the number of photons. Although his theory differed from thequantum theory of light introduced byAlbert Einstein in 1905, his name was adopted for what Einstein had called alight quantum (Lichtquant in German).
In 1921, Lewis was the first to propose an empirical equation describing the failure ofstrong electrolytes to obey thelaw of mass action, a problem that had perplexed physical chemists for twenty years.[52] His empirical equations for what he calledionic strength were later confirmed to be in accord with theDebye–Hückel equation for strong electrolytes, published in 1923.
Over the course of his career, Lewis published on many other subjects besides those mentioned in this entry, ranging from the nature oflight quanta to theeconomics of price stabilization. In the last years of his life, Lewis and graduate studentMichael Kasha, his last research associate, established thatphosphorescence oforganic molecules involves emission of light from one electron in an excitedtriplet state (a state in which two electrons have theirspin vectors oriented in thesame direction, but in different orbitals) and measured theparamagnetism of this triplet state.[53]
^Jensen, William B. (2017). "The Mystery of G. N. Lewis's Missing Nobel Prize".The Posthumous Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Volume 1. Correcting the Errors and Oversights of the Nobel Prize Committee. ACS Symposium Series. Vol. 1262. pp. 107–120.doi:10.1021/bk-2017-1262.ch006.ISBN978-0-8412-3251-8.
^Hildebrand, Joel H. (1958)."Gilbert Newton Lewis"(PDF).Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 31. Washington, D.C., U.S.A.: National Academy of Sciences. pp. 209–235.; see p. 210. Lewis's Ph.D. thesis was titled "Some electrochemical and thermochemical relations of zinc and cadmium amalgams". He published the results jointly with his supervisor T.W. Richards.
^Edsall, John T. (November 1974). "Some notes and queries on the development of bioenergetics notes on some 'founding fathers' of physical chemistry J. Willard Gibbs, Wilhelm Ostwald, Walther Nernst, Gilbert Newton Lewis".Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry.5 (1–2):103–112.doi:10.1007/BF01874179.PMID4610355.
^Lewis, Gilbert Newton (1900). "A new conception of thermal pressure and a theory of solutions".Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.36 (9):145–168.doi:10.2307/20020988.hdl:2027/njp.32101050586054.JSTOR20020988.[non-primary source needed] The term "escaping tendency" is introduced on p. 148, where it is represented by the Greek letterψ ;ψ is defined for ideal gases on p. 156.
^Lewis, Gilbert Newton (1923).Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules. American chemical society. Monograph series. New York: Chemical Catalog Company. p. 142.hdl:2027/uc1.b3219599.We are inclined to think of substances as possessing acid or basic properties, without having a particular solvent in mind. It seems to me that with complete generality we may say thata basic substance is one which has a lone pair of electrons which may be used to complete the stable group of another atom, and thatan acid substance is one which can employ a lone pair from another molecule in completing the stable group of one of its own atoms. In other words, the basic substance furnishes a pair of electrons for a chemical bond, the acid substance accepts such a pair.[non-primary source needed]
^Wilson, Edwin B.; Lewis, Gilbert N. (1912). "The Space-time Manifold of Relativity. The Non-Euclidean Geometry of Mechanics and Electromagnetics".Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.48 (11):387–507.doi:10.2307/20022840.JSTOR20022840.[non-primary source needed]
