Death of an Inventor

From an ice-coated sun deck on a suburban Evanston, Ill. home, a half-paralyzed chemist last week slipped and fell to his death. Thus prosaically ended the life of Winford Lee Lewis, 64, who invented one of the deadliest weapons of chemical warfare: lewisite.

Working at Catholic University in 1917, Lewis compounded lewisite from a poisonous black tar, produced it in quantity and turned it over to the Army's Chemical Warfare Section. A lewisite plant was erected at Willoughby, Ohio, surrounded by a high fence and heavy guards. So secret was the process that no workers were allowed to leave the premises. The plant became known as The Mousetrap.

The first batches were ready for shipment to Europe when the Armistice was signed. None saw combat, but lewisite had earned a sinister name--Dew of Death--because a few drops on a man's skin were sufficient to kill. Heavier and more persistent than mustard gas, lewisite is an arsenic compound which smells like geraniums, bears the scientific name of beta-chlorvinyldichlorarsine. While mustard causes many casualties but few deaths, lewisite was expected to cause a greater proportion of deaths.*

Because no one knew what to do with it, the U.S. supply of lewisite was dumped in the sea off Baltimore after the Armistice. But the secret formula lived on. It was printed in various international scientific journals, became the property of the world.

In World War II Lewis' invention has made one verified appearance thus far: at Ichang, in the Yangtze Valley, where 3,500 Chinese fell in October 1941 when the Japs unleashed clouds of lewisite. This was one of 880 verified instances of Jap use of gas. The Ichang incident was followed quickly by public warnings from President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. No repetitions have been reported.

Lewis, a jolly, articulate man in his prime, retired as the head of Northwestern University's chemistry department in 1924. To the last he predicted that Germany would use gas when it finally got into a hopeless situation. Said he: "Poison gas has lost two of its sources of value--the element of surprise and the element of use against defenseless troops."

* In World War I only 2% of all U.S. gas casualties died, a handful had permanent injuries. Of casualties from explosives, 26% died.

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