Elliot Quincy Adams

Who was Elliot Quincy Adams?

Elliot Quincy Adams was an American scientist. Chemist Gilbert N. Lewis remarked that "the two most profound scientific minds, among the people he had known, were those of E[lliot] Q Adams and Albert Einstein."

Adams was the son of Edward Perkins and Etta Medora Adams, and a descendant of John Adams, circa 1650 from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from Medford High School in Medford, Massachusetts, and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying chemical engineering under Gilbert N. Lewis, and in 1909 earned his bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering. After graduation, Adams took a position with the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where he worked with Irving Langmuir on problems dealing with heat transfer. In 1912 Adams supplied the simple mathematical formula that is used to describe the conduction-convection loss from an incandescent filament operated in a gaseous atmosphere, and in the same year moved to Berkeley, California, for doctoral studies at the University of California. In 1914 he earned his Ph.D.under the direction of Gilbert N. Lewis.

In 1917 Adams moved to Washington, D.