His formulation of the Nernst heat theorem helped pave the way for the third law of thermodynamics, for which he won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

[6] He wrote his thesis at University of Graz, where Ludwig Boltzmann was professor, though he worked under the direction of Albert von Ettinghausen.

Nernst sold the patent for one million marks, wisely not opting for royalties because soon the tungsten filament lamp filled with inert gas was introduced.

With his riches, Nernst in 1898 bought the first of the eighteen automobiles he owned during his lifetime and a country estate of more than five hundred hectares for hunting.

[7] After eighteen productive years at Göttingen, investigating osmotic pressure and electrochemistry and presenting a theory of how nerves conduct, he moved to Berlin, and was awarded the title of Geheimrat.

This is the work for which he is best remembered, as it enabled chemists to determine free energies (and therefore equilibrium points) of chemical reactions from heat measurements.

This fall was predicted for liquids and solids in a 1909 paper of Albert Einstein's on the quantum mechanics of specific heats at cryogenic temperatures.

In 1913 they traveled to Switzerland to persuade Einstein to accept it; a dream job: a named professorship at the top university in Germany, without teaching duties, leaving him free for research.

In 1914, the Nernsts were entertaining co-workers and students they had brought to their country estate in a private railway car when they learned that war had been declared.

He contacted Colonel Max Bauer, the staff officer responsible for munitions, with the idea of driving the defenders out of their trenches with shells releasing tear gas.

As a Staff Scientific Advisor in the Imperial German Army, he directed research on explosives, much of which was done in his laboratory where they developed guanidine perchlorate.

When the high command was considering unleashing unrestricted submarine warfare, he asked the Kaiser for an opportunity to warn about the enormous potential of the United States as an adversary.

For two unhappy years, he was the president of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (National Physical Laboratory), where he could not cope with the "mixture of mediocrity and red tape".

Although a press release described him as "completely unmusical",[14] Nernst developed an electric piano, the Neo-Bechstein-Flügel in 1930 in association with the Bechstein and Siemens companies, replacing the sounding board with vacuum tube amplifiers.

He lived quietly in the country; in 1937 he traveled to the University of Oxford to receive an honorary degree, also visiting his eldest daughter, her husband, and his three grandchildren.

With his colleagues at the University of Leipzig, Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff and Svante Arrhenius, hé was establishing the foundations of a new theoretical and experimental field of inquiry within chemistry and suggested setting fire to unused coal seams to increase the global temperature.

[16] His friend Albert Einstein was amused by "his childlike vanity and self-complacency"[18] "His own study and laboratory always presented aspects of extreme chaos which his coworkers termed appropriately 'the state of maximum entropy'".

[19] In 1923, botanist Ignatz Urban published Nernstia, which is a genus of flowering plants from Mexico, in the family Rubiaceae and named in his honour.