Gilbert Lewis was nominated 41 times for a Nobel and never won
Gilbert N. Lewis explained the covalent bond as a shared pair of electrons, gave chemistry its dot diagrams, and coined the word photon. His students collected Nobel Prizes by the handful. He himself was nominated 41 times without success, possibly because a rival's friend sat on the prize committee.
Lewis was born in 1875 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, read by age three and was schooled at home until his family moved to Nebraska. He earned his Harvard doctorate in 1899, then studied in Germany under Walther Nernst and Wilhelm Ostwald. With Nernst he developed a lifelong enmity, later calling Nernst's heat theorem work a regrettable episode in chemistry. There is evidence that Nernst's Swedish friend Wilhelm Palmær, a Nobel committee member, nominated Lewis three times and then wrote negative reports to block him.
His early theoretical work tried to turn thermodynamics' scattered equations into a single logical system that also worked for real, non-ideal substances. Along the way he introduced the idea of activity and coined fugacity, a substance's escaping tendency from one phase to another. It never became the grand foundation he hoped for, but it remains standard for describing real gases. After a spell as superintendent of weights and measures in Manila and years at MIT, he moved to Berkeley in 1912 as dean of chemistry.
At Berkeley he made thermodynamics rigorous yet usable for ordinary chemists, proposed his bonding theory in 1916, purified heavy water, and developed his definition of acids and bases. Men he took as students went on to win 14 Nobel Prizes, among them Harold Urey, Glenn Seaborg and Melvin Calvin, and Berkeley became one of the world's leading chemistry centres. His record has a darker side: he barred women, including Margaret Melhase, co-discoverer of cesium-137, from graduate study. He probably felt he deserved a share of Urey's 1934 prize for deuterium.
In March 1946 a student found him dead in his laboratory beside an experiment using hydrogen cyanide. The coroner ruled heart disease, though some colleagues suspected otherwise. Earlier that day he had lunched with his old rival Irving Langmuir, who had won the 1932 prize partly by extending Lewis's bonding ideas. Berkeley's Lewis Hall, built in 1948, bears his name.
Source: Gilbert N. Lewis
