Career
Lewis was born and raised in Weymouth, Massachusetts, where there exists a street named for him, G.N. Lewis Way, off of Summer Street. Additionally, the wing of the new Weymouth High School Chemistry department has been named in his honor. After earning his Ph.D. at Harvard under the direction of Theodore Richards, Lewis stayed as an instructor for a year before taking a traveling fellowship, studying under the physical chemists Wilhelm Ostwald at Leipzig and physicist Walther Nernst at Göttingen. While working in Nernst's lab, Nernst and Lewis apparently developed a lifelong enmity. A 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 a Nobel Prize for Lewis in thermodynamics by nominating Lewis for the prize three times, and then using his position as a committee member to write negative reports.
After his stay in Nernst's lab, Lewis 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, Massachusetts when the Massachusetts 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 of Arthur Amos Noyes. He became an assistant professor in 1907, associate professor in 1908, and full professor in 1911. He left MIT in 1912 to become a professor of physical chemistry and dean of the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Lewis Hall at Berkeley, built in 1948, is named in his honor.
Read more about this topic: Gilbert N. Lewis
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)