Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875-1946)
G. N. Lewis was respected by knowledgeable contemporaries for his writing and the excellence of his research, but valued as much for his clear thinking, his scholarly enthusiasm, and his ability to lead other scientific thinkers.

Lewis was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1875, but spent much of his youth in Lincoln, Nebraska. After being schooled at home, he was admitted in 1889 to a preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska. He entered Harvard College in 1893 and received an A.B. degree in 1896. Following a year of teaching at the Phillips Academy in Andover, he returned to Harvard and received his A.M. degree in 1898 and his Ph.D. in 1899, under T. W. Richards. He spent one year as an instructor at the college and then studied in Germany with F. W. Ostwald and H. W. Nernst, before returning for three more years as an instructor at Harvard.

Lewis was not satisfied with the research atmosphere at Harvard. Wanting time to consider his future, he took a position in the Philippines for one year to work in the Bureau of Science. When he returned in 1905, he was invited to Massachusetts Institute of Technology by A. A. Noyes, who had been a student of Ostwaldås. Lewis spent seven years at MIT, where he published 30 papers and rose to a full professorship.

When Lewis came to Berkeley in 1912, his first laboratories were in a temporary wooden building.  Awaiting state bond money, the construction of Gilman Hall was delayed until 1916, and was first occupied in September 1917. Gilman Hall's next quarter century came to be known as the G. N. Lewis era.

At times, Lewis spent his weekdays on campus, using a small bedroom and shower in a Gilman Hall attic room, while his family lived in the country. After the university ruled against living in its research buildings, Lewis moved into the nearby Faculty Club.

Lewis was rarely in the classroom, but his weekly research seminar set the standard for the College of Chemistry. Two hundred and ninety Ph.D.s were granted under Lewis and his colleagues. He worked with great intensity and had a series of research assistants for experimental work. He took only a few graduate students, although many other students worked with younger faculty on projects within Lewis's broad area of interest.

G. N. Lewis's publications covered, among other things, relativity, natural radioactivity, refraction of neutrons, acid-base properties, and classical and statistical thermodynamics. He is often quoted as having said that "physical chemistry is anything which is interesting." Most chemists remember Lewis best for his octet theory and the electron-pair bonding diagrams, which he first published in 1916, and for the generalized theory of acids and bases, which bears his name. His most famous book, Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, written with Merle Randall, was published in 1923.

Harold C. Urey (a 1923 UC-Berkeley Ph.D., and 1934 Nobel laureate) had discovered deuterium at Columbia University in 1932. Lewis actively pursued the new field of deuterium chemistry, and between 1932 and 1934, he published more than 25 papers on the topic. Later in the 1930s, Lewis returned to the theories of acids and bases, and a 1938 lecture at the Franklin Institute "did much to make the Lewis acid an important part of chemical theory."

Responding to the increased popularity of the field of photochemistry in the 1930s, Lewis published, with Melvin Calvin, a long review of the theory of color. Lewis continued his studies of fluorescence and phosphorescence and published several important papers about quantum theory.

On March 23, 1946, Gilbert Newton Lewis died in his Gilman Hall laboratory, while carrying out an experiment on fluorescence.