On a Sunday afternoon in March 1943, Stanford chemistry professors Robert E. Swain and Herman A. Spoehr ambled into the Foothills to help an in-law of Winford Lee Lewis, Class of 1902, scatter his ashes. Sixty years later, Maj. Michael Hamlet mistakenly reported finding 14 barrels of chemical agents, including one called lewisite, buried in the Iraqi desert. The connection? The deadly substance is the Stanford graduate’s namesake.
Winford Lewis was born in Gridley, Calif., and entered Stanford in 1896 to study law. However, tuberculosis forced him to withdraw for two years; on returning he pursued chemistry, earning his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1909. Lewis probably would have continued his career as a popular chemistry professor at Northwestern University if not for World War I. He became one of the scientists developing poison gases for the “Chemist’s War.” As director of a Chemical Warfare Service unit in Washington, D.C., his orders were to develop an agent more lethal and quicker acting than mustard gas.
Lewis’s unit succeeded beyond expectations. They developed an arsenic-based liquid agent that readily vaporized and caused immediately painful blisters on contact. “Lewisite” smelled like geraniums but could cause rapid death through inhalation or absorption. Accordingly, the Chemical Warfare Service in July 1918 constructed a top-secret plant in Willoughby, Ohio, to produce 3,000 tons of lewisite. The plan was to use the poison to end the war in a spring 1919 Allied offensive.
And then, surprisingly, on November 11, 1918, Germany surrendered. The Willoughby facility had just reached its capacity of 10 tons per day and produced about 150 tons. Reaching this level of production in so short a period was remarkable. Lewis, however, expressed some frustration that their monumental effort wasn’t needed. “Who would have wished to waste another copper [penny], or risk one scratch of Sammy’s epidermis in pure vindictiveness? Nevertheless, we of the Chemical Warfare Service felt strangely punctured, depressed and irritable next morning after the celebration,” he wrote in the Chemical Bulletin.
But Lewis and the American prowess behind lewisite were not forgotten. Newspapers and magazines around the country published articles boasting that as few as 10 airplanes carrying lewisite bombs could have destroyed “every vestige of life” in Berlin. Lewisite became the subject of serials and figured in novels. And Lewis wrote and spoke widely. He believed chemical weapons were more humane than conventional ones—while asserting that every aspect of warfare is an “improper use of science.”
Publicity had its negative side. Other countries developed production facilities. Italy probably used lewisite in its 1936 conquest of Ethiopia. In 1937, Lewis declined an offer to oversee construction of a lewisite plant in the Soviet Union.
Lewisite was expected to be a major factor in World War II. The Japanese used it in attacks on China, but not in any major battles. Later, most countries disposed of their stockpiles, generally by ocean dumping. Only North Korea is believed to still be producing lewisite.
The stockpiling and deposition of arsenic-laden lewisite has created environmental hazards around the world, especially in the relatively shallow Arctic seas, the preferred Soviet dumping site. But it had an inadvertently positive effect on modern medicine. Fears that Nazis might use it led to frenetic efforts to find an antidote. In 1940, biochemists at Oxford University produced British anti-lewisite, or BAL, successful both as an antidote and as the premier chelating, or metal-removing, agent of the mid-20th century, used to treat anyone who had ingested large amounts of arsenic, mercury or lead. Moreover, in 1951 BAL first proved effective treating Wilson’s disease, a rare neurological disorder caused by a defect in the body’s ability to excrete copper.
Lewis did not live to see BAL ’s benefits. He often said that he wanted to be remembered more for his basic scientific studies. Nevertheless, lewisite is the legacy of the man whose ashes were scattered behind Stanford about 60 years ago.
JOEL A.VILENSKY, professor of anatomy and cell biology at Indiana University School of Medicine, wrote Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America’s World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction (Indiana University Press, 2005).
