Surface stress was first defined by Josiah Willard Gibbs[1] (1839-1903) as the amount of the

reversible work per unit area needed to elastically stretch a pre-existing surface. A suggestion is
surface stress define as association with the amount of the reversible work per unit area needed
to elastically stretch a pre-existing surface instead of up definition. A similar term called “surface
free energy”, which represents the excess free energy per unit area needed to create a new
surface, is easily confused with “surface stress”. Although surface stress and surface free energy
of liquid–gas or liquid–liquid interface are the same, they are very different in solid–gas or solid–
solid interface, which will be discussed in details later. Since both terms represent a force per
unit length, they have been referred to as “surface tension”, which contributes further to the
confusion in the literature.