Yale Connections

From WikidChem

Yale_connections Slide 28:

We are also connected to the founders of physical chemistry through people at Yale:

Dedication of Sterling Chemistry Laboratory April, 1923. Three leading physical chemists are labeled.

G. N. Lewis, our old friend, the one who carried out the Lewis structure.

Sadly, he died at age 70 by heart attack. Some suspect that it was suicide, after having lunch with Irving Langmuir the same day. (where did you get this interesting tidbit? It's news to me. - JMM) Lewis was responsible for determining the free energy of many elements. He also worked on relativity, when he was at MIT.

T.W. Richards, he was at Harvard at that time. it was eleven years after his Nobel Prize, and three years before his death.

Bancroft was a student of Wilhelm Ostwald and Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff. It is worth noticing that it was Oswald who translated Gibbs' pappers into German which finally won Gibbs recognition. German was at that time the leading language in Chemistry. And actually Chemistry was also one of the leading industries in the industrial revolution in Germany. The development of the dye industry promoted the booming of both the economy and science.

Question: Where is Sterling?

   * Dead for 4 or 5 years. All the Sterling memorials at Yale came from his estate. - JMM

Slides 29-30: Those in the previous slide were just visitors to our haunts, but Gibbs was a real Yale man. It is interesting that Gibbs' father Josiah Willard Gibbs was a linguist in New Haven. I guess he was at Yale. He was one of the key witnesses in the Amistad trial in 1839. he had been able to find a translator for the defendants' Mende language by learning to count to ten in that language, and then counting out loud in the harbor of New York City.

The recognition of Gibbs early work was slow, because he used to publish his papers in the journal of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences, which was less read in America. It is funny that this journal was edited by his librarian brother-in-law. So it seems that the whole family of Gibbs lives in New Haven, and for generations. So who is his descendant? Of course he was buried here :D

Also, Gibbs contributed some of the most significant work on chemical thermodynamics, including the idea of Free Energy which was later named after him.

Slides 31: The different tetrahedrons show that the idea of explaining optical activity in terms of the tetrahedral carbon did not require strict tetrahedral geometry of the carbon bonds. Van't Hoff showed this by distorting some of his tetrahedral models. The organic stereochemical concept was not quantitative.