|
 Today is the birthday of Irving Langmuir, the American chemist, physicist, engineer, and industrial researcher who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, probed plasma physics, earned 63 U.S. patents, and worked for the General Electric (GE) Research Laboratory for over 40 years. Irving Langmuir was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 31, 1881. The third of four children, he was deeply influenced by an older brother, Arthur Langmuir, who worked as a research chemist. As a boy, Irving set up a chemistry lab in a corner of his bedroom and quizzed Arthur about a variety of scientific subjects. Irving's parents, Charles and Sadie Langmuir, also encouraged Irving's scientific interests, teaching the boy how to keep detailed accounts of his observations.
Irving Langmuir's formal education spanned two continents, but was centered in New York City and Germany. After finishing high school, Langmuir enrolled at the Columbia University School of Mines, graduating with a B.S. in metallurgical engineering in 1903. Three years later, he earned a Ph.D. in Göttingen, Germany for his work with Nobel laureate Walther Nernst, inventor of a now-obsolete electric lamp that provided a continuous source of white light. Langmuir's doctoral thesis, "On the Partial Recombination of Dissolved Gases During Cooling," examined the gaseous chemistry of the Nernst glower, a commercially-available lamp made of metal-oxides which was heated electrically to 2000° C.
After completing postdoctoral work in chemistry, Irving Langmuir taught at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and then moved to Schenectady, New York to work at GE's Research Laboratory. Langmuir's first invention, the diffusion pump, was followed by his discovery that filling a light bulb with an inert gas lengthened the life of the tungsten filament. As Langmuir continued to study filaments in gaseous environments, he began to focus on thermions, charged particles that flow from a metal or metal-oxide surface as a result of thermal-vibrational energy. During the course of his research, Langmuir applied the term "plasma" to describe the ionized gases which represented a fourth state of matter. He also invented the Langmuir probe, a diagnostic instrument for measuring electron temperature, electron density, and plasma potential. Electron temperature, Langmuir discovered, is usually higher than ion temperature, especially in weakly-ionized plasmas. Langmuir's later development of hydrogen welding formed the basis for both plasma arc welding (PAW) and gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) or tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding, a related technique.
Irving Langmuir's contributions as an engineer and industrial researcher complemented his contributions to chemistry and physics. While working with Katherine Blodgett, the first woman scientist at GE's Research Laboratory, Langmuir studied the behavior of adsorbed monatomic films on tungsten and platinum filaments. Subsequent experiments with oil films on water led Langmuir to formulate a general theory about thin films and surface absorption. In 1932, Langmuir won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work regarding monolayers, layers of materials just one molecule thick, and the two-dimensional physics used to describe them. The industrial researcher's contributions to chemistry also included examinations of the arrangement of electrons in atoms, work that contributed to the development of valence-bond theory.
During World War II, Irving Langmuir supported America's war effort by improving naval sonar for submarine detection, developing protective smoke screens, and devising methods for de-icing aircraft wings. He also theorized that combining dry ice and iodide in sufficiently-moist, low-temperature clouds – a practice now known as cloud seeding – would produce precipitation. During the 1950s, Langmuir was featured on the cover of Time magazine and made news for coining the term "pathological science," research conducted according to the scientific method, but designed to prove the existence of extrasensory perception (ESP) and unidentified flying objects (UFOs). In the end, wrote physicist Percy Bridgman, Langmuir was a scientist first.
Irving Langmuir died in 1957.
Resources:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1932/langmuir-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Langmuir
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0040-165X(198304)24%3A2%3C199%3AILATPO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Nernst
http://www.nernst.de/lamp/nernstlamp.htm
| 
