Josiah Willard Gibbs | Biography

In the mid-1800s, while European scientists enjoyed recognition for their remarkable discoveries in chemistry, physics, and biology, American scientists remained almost completely unknown. However, beginning in 1876, the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell began heralding the work of a heretofore anonymous American, Willard Gibbs. Though acceptance of his theories came slowly, Gibbs would eventually be considered one of the greatest theoretical physicists ever.

Gibbs was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to a family of well-known academics. His father was a professor of sacred literature at Yale University, and it was a foregone conclusion that he would attend that school. Gibbs received his bachelor's degree in 1858, and in 1863 he became the first American to receive a Ph.D. in engineering. Gibbs realized that the opportunities for scientific advancement in the United States were slim, and after three years as a tutor at Yale, he traveled to Europe to continue his education.

It was in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne, the University of Berlin, and the University of Heidelberg that the foundation for Gibbs ' future work was built. He studied under Gustav Kirchhoff, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Joseph Liouville (1809-1882), becoming more and more fascinated with the field of theoretical physics. Upon his return to the United States in 1871 he was offered a professorship at Yale--without salary. Still, he accepted the position, moved back into his childhood home, lived off a generous inheritance, and never again left the United States.

During the years from 1876 to 1878, Gibbs contributed groundbreaking essays regularly to the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences. He discussed the principles of thermodynamics, applying them to the complex processes involved in chemical reactions. His discovered the concept of chemical potential, or the "fuel" that makes chemical reactions work.

Also in these essays were the beginnings of Gibbs' theories of phases of matter. He considered each state of matter a phase, and each substance a component. Thus, a system of ice and water would be one component in two phases, while solid and dissolved sugar in water would be two components in two phases. Gibbs took all of the variables involved in a chemical reaction--temperature, pressure, energy, volume, and entropy--and included them in one simple equation. By plugging some of the variables into the equation the rest could be easily deduced. This equation has come to be known as the Phase rule.

Over the course of the next fifty years, Gibbs' work initiated unprecedented insight into the nature of chemical reactions. Scientists would write more than eleven thousand pages of discussion of the Phase rule, though Gibbs wrote only four pages to introduce it. Before 195O, four Nobel Prizes would be awarded for research stemming directly from Gibbs' work.

However, the monumental importance of Gibbs' findings was not immediately recognized. First, the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences in which his essays were published was not well read even in America, let alone Europe. Second, when his publications were read, they were considered too mathematically complex for most chemists and too involved in chemistry for many mathematicians. It was not until Maxwell advocated Gibbs' work that European scientists began to understand its ramifications, and even then it was not until the 1890s that his ideas gained general acceptance. His memoirs were translated into German by Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald and into French by Henry Louis Le Châtelier. Before his death in 1903 he was awarded the Copley Medal of the British Royal Society, the most prestigious international science award.