Gilbert Newton Lewis Biography

Gilbert Lewis was an American physicist known throughout the world for his work in the so-called point diagrams or the so-called Lewis structure and the idea of ​​the concept of covalent bond and photon. He was born on October 23, 1875, in Weymouth, Massachusetts and is the son of Mary Burr White Lewis and Frank Wesley Lewis.

At the age of 9, he enrolled in public school, in which he studied until 1889. Thanks to his brilliantness, in that same year he entered the University of Nebraska where he did some studies in physics and chemistry. In 1892, he moved to Cambridge, where he enrolled at Harvard University to study chemistry, he was also interested in some areas of economics. In Harvard, Lewis would obtain his B.A. in 1896 and his Ph.D. in 1898. At that time, he also did work related to chemistry and published many articles and documents where he showed the results of his research. After obtaining his doctorate, Lewis worked as a professor at Harvard for one year.

At the end of 1899, he traveled to Leipzig, where he studied with the physic-chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and Walter Nernst in Göttingen through a scholarship that was granted. After completing his studies in Europe, he returned to Harvard where he settled again for 3 years and in 1904 he left the university to take over as superintendent of measurements and weights in the science office located in the Philippine Islands of Manila. Around 1908, he would publish an article related to the theory of relativity, where he concluded the relationship between mass and energy, by a different process than the one used by Albert Einstein.

In 1916 Lewis worked on atomic models and formulated his own model called the cubic atom model. He also proclaimed the idea of ​​the covalent bond which refers to a pair of shared electrons in the non-metallic elements that have 4 to 7 electrons of valence. Based on that theory, invented the term Odd electron-molecule that occurred when an electron was not shared. In that same year, he also formulated the octet rule. Lewis’ ideas were disseminated and developed by Irving Langmuir around 1923.

By the year 1919, he discovered the first evidence that the atom of oxygen was tetrameric, by conducting studies of the magnetic properties of solutions between oxygen and liquid nitrogen. 4 years later, he would formulate the theory of electronic torque in acid-base chemical reactions, which allowed distinguishing these compounds as “Lewis acids and bases”.

Lewis’ theories began to be well recognized at that time, so he continued working and devoted 25 years of his life to describe and determine the free energy of various substances and in 1923 he published the results of the studies done together with Merle Randall, which resulted in thermodynamic chemistry.

In 1926, he described the term photon, which he described as the smallest unit of radiant energy. Sometime later, in 1933, Lewis was the first professional in his career to produce a pure sample of deuterium oxide and he proved that the phosphorescence of organic molecules follows the state of an excited triplet by measuring its magnetic properties. In that time he also published many articles related to light and economics.

On March 23, 1946, he died of a heart attack while performing experiments with hydrocyanic acid in his laboratory in Berkeley.