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Josiah Willard Gibbs
1839–1903 · 64 years Tier I
Yale gave him a professorship and no salary for nine years
His father taught sacred literature at the Yale Divinity School and is remembered outside philology for one thing: he found the interpreter who let the Africans of the Amistad testify in an American court. The son stayed close to home in every sense. Hopkins School, then Yale College at 15, prizes in mathematics and Latin, graduation near the top of the class in 1858. He had an astigmatism no American oculist of the day could correct, so he worked out his own prescription and ground his own lenses. Weak eyes and a delicate constitution kept him out of the Civil War. His father died in 1861 and left him money enough that he never had to earn any.
Yale gave him a doctorate in 1863 for a thesis on the shape of gear teeth — the first engineering PhD awarded in the United States and only the fifth doctorate of any kind. He patented a railway brake, spent three years hearing lectures in Paris, Berlin and Heidelberg, and came home to a professorship in mathematical physics, the first such chair in the country, carrying no salary. Then between 1875 and 1878 he ran roughly 300 pages and 700 numbered equations through the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy under the title On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances. Chemical potential, free energy, the phase rule — most of what a chemistry department now teaches about equilibrium is in there. Vector analysis followed, then statistical mechanics, a phrase he coined, in 1902.
He put the most consequential American science of the century into a journal almost nobody read, in a notation so compressed that the few who received offprints could not follow it. James Clerk Maxwell could. Maxwell built a plaster model of Gibbs's thermodynamic surface for water and mailed a cast to New Haven, then died in 1879 before he could carry the argument any further in England. Recognition came from Germany instead, where Wilhelm Ostwald translated the monograph and called its author the founder of chemical energetics. Yale, meanwhile, paid him nothing for nine years and began paying only when Johns Hopkins offered 3,000 dollars in 1880. Yale countered with 2,000. He took it and stayed, in the house he had grown up in, with his sister Julia and her husband.
An acute intestinal obstruction killed him in New Haven on April 28, 1903, at 64. The funeral was at 121 High Street and the body went a few blocks to Grove Street Cemetery. He had never married and left an estate of about 100,000 dollars. What he did put into circulation was students: Lee De Forest carried the training into radio, and Edwin Bidwell Wilson turned the lecture notes into the vector analysis textbook that trained a generation of engineers. Einstein later called him the greatest mind in American history. Most Americans have still never heard the name, which is the standing joke about him and also an accurate summary.
Lifespan
Josiah Willard Gibbs's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
On the Form of the Teeth of Wheels in Spur Gearing
article
The doctoral thesis, and the first engineering PhD granted in America 1863 -
Railway brake design
patent
Patented three years after the doctorate 1866 -
On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances
article
About 300 pages and 700 numbered equations, in an obscure Connecticut journal 1878 -
Elements of Vector Analysis
book
Privately printed notes that gave physics the dot and cross products 1884 -
Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics
book
He coined the phrase in the title 1902
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1854 aged ~15 Enters Yale College at 15
- 1861 aged ~22 His father dies and leaves him financially independent Poor eyesight and delicate health kept him out of the war then being fought.
- 1863 aged ~24 Takes the first American doctorate in engineering
- 1866 aged ~27 Sails for Europe and hears Kirchhoff, Helmholtz and Weierstrass
- 1871 aged ~32 Appointed professor of mathematical physics at Yale, without salary He had published nothing at all.
- 1878 aged ~39 Completes On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances
- 1880 aged ~41 Johns Hopkins offers 3,000 dollars a year and Yale counters with 2,000 He stayed.
- 1901 aged ~62 The Royal Society awards him the Copley Medal
- April 28, 1903 aged 64 Dies at 64 of an acute intestinal obstruction
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