Winford Lee Lewis

Winford Lee Lewis (born May 29, 1878 in Gridley (California) , † January 20, 1943 in Evanston (Illinois) ) was an American chemist. In 1917 he rediscovered the chemical warfare agent lewisite , which was named after him.

Lewis graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1902 and the University of Washington with a master's degree in chemistry in 1904 (he was also an instructor there). He then became a professor of chemistry at Morningside College in Sioux City . In 1906 he married one of his students, Myrtilla Mae Cook, in Chicago. Previously he had received a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he worked with the organic chemist John Ulric Nef and received his doctorate in 1909 (dissertation: On the action of Fehling's solution on malt sugar). In 1912 he became an assistant professor and in 1916 an associate professor at Northwestern University . In 1917 he began working on chemical warfare research. At the Catholic University a professor made him aware of the dissertation of a doctoral student ( Julius Arthur Nieuwland (1878-1936), later Catholic priest and chemistry professor at the University of Notre Dame), who produced a foul-smelling black tar in a kind of laboratory accident and failed several days after smelling it. Lewis repeated the experiment and found Lewisite. Although it was no longer used during World War I, it was mass-produced by the US armed forces and was scheduled for use in 1919. After the war - now a celebrity - he gave lectures on chemical weapons, which he considered to be no more inhuman than grenades, for example. He also believed that fear of the use of Allied chemical weapons was one of the reasons the Germans surrendered. In 1919 he was given a full professorship at Northwestern University, which he held until 1930. He likely died of a heart attack and fell off the roof of his garage in the winter.

Before and after the war, he studied food chemistry, arsenic-containing organic compounds, and the chemistry of carbohydrates. From 1924 to 1941 he directed research at the Institute of American Meat Packers. He also received a patent for a tear gas grenade.

In 1920 he was the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society.

literature

• Joel A. Vilensky: Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America's World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction, Indiana University Press 2005

Individual evidence

1. ^ Theo Emery, The Scientists Who Created America's War Gases , The Alicia Patterson Foundation