Gilbert N. Lewis

Gilbert Newton Lewis (born in 1875 in Weymouth, Massachusetts; died March 23, 1946) was an American physical chemist who served as dean of the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most famous for describing the covalent bond and the idea of electron pairs, and his Lewis dot structures and work on valence bond theory remain central to how chemists understand bonding. He made important advances in chemical thermodynamics, photochemistry, and isotope separation, and he also developed a well-known theory of acids and bases. In addition, Lewis studied relativity and quantum physics, and in 1926 he introduced the term "photon" to refer to the smallest unit of radiant energy.

Lewis grew up in Weymouth, Massachusetts, where a street and a high school chemistry wing now bear his name. He was taught at home by his parents, Frank Wesley Lewis and Mary Burr White Lewis, and learned to read by age three. His family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1884, and he began formal schooling at a university preparatory school in 1889. After two years at the University of Nebraska, he transferred to Harvard, earning a B.S. in 1896.

Following a year teaching at Phillips Academy in Andover, he returned to Harvard for his Ph.D., which he completed in 1899 under physical chemist T. W. Richards, with a dissertation on electrochemical potentials. He then taught at Harvard for a year before taking a traveling fellowship to Germany, where he studied with Walther Nernst at Göttingen and Wilhelm Ostwald at Leipzig. While in Nernst’s lab, Lewis developed a lasting hostility toward him, later calling Nernst’s heat theorem work “a regrettable episode in the history of chemistry.”

A Swedish friend of Nernst’s, Wilhelm Palmær, served on the Nobel Chemistry Committee and reportedly used his position to block Lewis from winning a Nobel Prize in thermodynamics by nominating him three times and then writing negative reports.

After his time in Germany, Lewis returned to Harvard in 1901 as an instructor in thermodynamics and electrochemistry. In 1904, he took a leave to become Superintendent of Weights and Measures for the Bureau of Science in Manila, Philippines. The next year, he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working under Arthur Amos Noyes. He became an assistant professor in 1907, associate professor in 1908, and full professor in 1911. In 1912, Lewis moved to the University of California, Berkeley, as a professor of physical chemistry and dean of the College of Chemistry. He married Mary Hinckley Sheldon, daughter of a Harvard professor, on June 21, 1912; they had two sons, both of whom became chemistry professors, and a daughter. He joined the professional chemistry fraternity Alpha Chi Sigma at Berkeley in 1913.

At Berkeley, Lewis reformed the chemistry curriculum by incorporating thermodynamic principles in a mathematically rigorous way that ordinary chemists could use. He began measuring free energy values for many chemical processes, both organic and inorganic. In 1916, he proposed his theory of bonding and added electron information to the periodic table. In 1933, he started work on isotope separation, purifying a sample of heavy water using hydrogen.

He later developed his acid-base theory and spent his final years on photochemistry. Though nominated 41 times, Lewis never won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, a notable controversy. However, he mentored many future Nobel laureates at Berkeley, including Harold Urey (1934), William F. Giauque (1949), Glenn T. Seaborg (1951), Willard Libby (1960), and Melvin Calvin (1961), helping turn Berkeley into a world-leading chemistry center. On March 23, 1946, Lewis was found dead in his Berkeley laboratory, where he had been working with hydrogen cyanide; many believed he died by suicide. After his death, his children pursued chemistry careers, and Lewis Hall on the Berkeley campus was named in his honor.