Nevil Vincent Sidgwick

Nevil Vincent Sidgwick (born May 8, 1873, Oxford—died March 15, 1952, Oxford) was an English chemist who contributed to the understanding of chemical bonding, especially in coordination compounds.

Sidgwick’s work in organic nitrogen compounds, presented in his Organic Chemistry of Nitrogen (1910), was of enduring value. With Sir Ernest Rutherford he developed an interest in the forces that hold molecules together. After World War I he advanced the idea of the hydrogen bond to explain the behaviour of some organic molecules. During the 1920s he extended Gilbert N. Lewis’ concept of electron sharing in covalent bonds and expressed the idea that one atom could donate a pair of electrons to another atom and thereby form a “coordinate link.” Among his writings was the two-volume Chemical Elements and Their Compounds (1950).