Surface stress was first defined by Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) as the amount of the reversible work per unit area needed to elastically stretch a pre-existing surface. Depending upon the convention used, the area is either the original, unstretched one which represents a constant number of atoms, or sometimes is the final area; these are atomistic versus continuum definitions. Some care is needed to ensure that the definition used is also consistent with the elastic strain energy, and misinterpretations and disagreements have occurred in the literature.