In thermodynamics, Theodore Richards (1868-1928) was an American chemist noted for his 1902 paper “The Relation of Changing Heat Capacity to Change of Free Energy, Heat of Reaction, Change of Volume, and Chemical Affinity”, in which he pointed out very clearly that the question of whether A > U or U < A above absolute zero (where U = A) depends upon whether the heat capacity is increased or decreased by the chemical process; where A is the maximum external work (or free energy) and U is the energy of the body. [1] This was an historical forerunner to Walther Nernst’s heat theorem or the third law of thermodynamics. [2] Richards won the 1914 Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on atomic weights.
Students
Richards was the thesis advisor to Gilbert Lewis at Harvard, a PhD jointly published as “Some Electrochemical and Thermochemical Reactions of Zinc and Cadmium Amalgams”. [3] Richards was also acquainted with Percy Bridgman.
References
1. Richards, Theodore. (1902). “The Relation of Changing Heat Capacity to Change of Free Energy, Heat of Reaction, Change of Volume, and Chemical Affinity”, Zeitsch. Physik. Chem. 42: 129.
2. Nernst, Walther. (1926). The New Heat Theorem (pgs. 227-31). E.P. Dutton & Co.
3. Hildebrand, Joel H. (1947). “Gilbert Newton Lewis: 1875-1946”, Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 5: 491-506.
External links
● Theodore William Richards – Wikipedia.
