I love chemistry and reading about famous chemists. Further, I really like writing about them; perhaps educating current scientists about their contributions and backgrounds. This Week In Science History, I am profiling another in my famous chemist series, J. Willard Gibbs, who was born this week, on February 11, 1839.  

Gibbs came from a long line of academics. His father was a professor at Yale University (in the Divinity school), the university Gibbs would attend and be graduated from in 1858. He was an excellent student and graduated near the top of his class. In 1863, he earned the first Ph.D. degree in Engineering (also from Yale) in the United States. After graduation, Gibbs studied in Europe and was influenced by the leading chemists and thermodynamics practitioners of his day, including Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1871, he returned to Yale and became a professor, a position he would hold for the rest of his life.  

During the early years of his professorship, between 1876 and 1878, Gibbs wrote a series of papers which were published together in a monograph titled On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances. This work would become one of the most important documents in chemistry (I recall a friend in his Ph.D. defense freezing up when asked about the Gibbs Free Energy equation!). Gibbs was able to take the concepts of thermodynamics and connect these with other physiochemical phenomena.  He was the first to apply the concept of chemical potential (similar in idea to electric potential), think diffusion, to physical chemistry. 

In addition, he described the concept of free energy, which is the amount of work that a thermodynamic system can perform. His work would set the basis for the field of statistical mechanics. Each of these subjects forms the basis for much of the subject matter one takes in a physical chemistry course in school (the concepts are the same in freshman chemistry, albeit simplified). Gibbs’ work has influenced and been cited by many future Nobel laureates including Johan van der Waals (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1910), Max Planck (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1918), and William Giauque (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1949).  The publishing of the work by Gilbert Lewis and Merle Randall (Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances)  in 1923 really introduced his work to a larger population of scientists.  

Gibbs was a recluse and seems to have been totally engrossed in science. Little is known about him outside of his interactions in science.  He would pass away at the age of 64 on April 28, 1903. 

Follow me on Twitter (@tsntwish) for daily science history updates!