Nevil Vincent Sidgwick FRS
Biography
Sidgwick was born in Park Town, Oxford, the elder of two children of William Carr Sidgwick, lecturer at Oriel College, and Sarah Isabella (née Thompson), descended from a notable family; her uncle was Thomas Perronet Thompson.
He was initially educated at Summer Fields School but, after a year, he entered Rugby School in 1886. From there he was elected to an open scholarship in Natural Science at Christ Church, Oxford. He gained a first in 1895, and went on to gain another first in Greats in 1897, a very rare feat. His principal interest, though, was science, and he spent some time in Wilhelm Ostwald’s laboratory in Germany, where he fell ill and had to go home. He returned to Germany in the autumn of 1899, this time in Hans von Pechmann’s lab at the University of Tübingen. His researches on derivatives of acetone-dicarboxylic acid resulted in his being award a DSc in 1901.
Sidgwick was elected to a Fellowship at Lincoln College, where he went into residence in October 1901 and remained for the rest of his life. On 1 July he set sail on the maiden voyage of the Euripides from London to Brisbane, disembarking at Adelaide. A fellow first-class passenger was Sir Ernest Rutherford, who had been knighted that year. Sidgwick became a devotee of the physicist, and would hear no criticism of him in later years.
Sidgwick became absorbed by the study of atomic structure and its importance in chemical bonding. He explained the bonding in coordination compounds (complexes), with a convincing account of the significance of the dative bond. Together with his students he demonstrated the existence and wide-ranging importance of the hydrogen bond. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1922. These ideas were later developed into the VSEPR theory by Gillespie and Nyholm.
The scope and significance of his researches brought international fame for Sidgwick. He travelled to Toronto for a British Association meeting in 1924, and then explored much of western Canada. Another BA meeting in 1929 took him to Cape Town and then Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, and back home via Aden and Suez. Two years later he was off to spend a semester at Cornell University, via New York and Princeton University. Cornell provided him “with every luxury that an American laboratory can supply. Two offices, four telephones, a private laboratory, and a stenographer, all to myself. . . It is a wonderful place, with a great deal of good work going on, and everybody is most kind, so that I can see that I am going to have a very pleasant time here.”