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Irving Langmuir: A Living Legacy
| Article
# : |
17767 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
2,831 Words |
| Author
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George Wise
George Wise is a communications specialist for the G.E.
Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York,
where Langmuir worked for over 30 years. |
Beyond the reach of earth's atmosphere, satellites and deep space probes have revealed that our solar system is permeated by a dilute collection of charged particles called a plasma. Irving Langmuir coined the term and helped create the field of plasma physics more than 60 years ago. Engineers seek to apply to microelectronic circuitry a type of film only a few molecules thick, possessing exciting electrical properties. Langmuir and coworker Katharine Blodgett discovered those films. A physiologist publishes a book in 1989 describing the evolution of man's understanding of cell membranes: Langmuir's work on surface chemistry, for which he won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is a central episode in the story. Yet Langmuir died more than 30 years ago, leaving behind a body of work notable not just for its size (his collected works fill twelve volumes) but also for its breadth and perpetual timeliness.
Irving Langmuir was born in 1881 in Brooklyn. As a college student at Columbia University at the turn of the century, he was already committed to a lifetime goal: "to be free to do research as I wish." This was in keeping with family training that stressed self-reliance and exploration. When his father, an insurance executive, had taken the family to live in Europe, one vacation was spent in the Alps. There Irving, through only 12 years old, had been encouraged to go alone on day-long hikes and climbs.
That independence was tested during his scientific apprenticeship. His doctoral work under a Nobel laureate, German chemist Walther Nernst, at the University of Gottingen, provided valuable training, but the autocratic German research climate was disappointing. So was a stint as an instructor at Stevens Tech in Hoboken, New Jersey. A heavy teaching load limited research time.
In 1909, Langmuir got a summer job at General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. His initial intent was to pick up some money and look around for a university post that would offer more opportunities to do research than Stevens had. But to his surprise, he found more freedom there than he had encountered in academic life. He never left, spending the rest of his career at GE as a researcher and the laboratory's associate director (an honorary post that left him free to set his own course).
The lab's director, Willis R. Whitney, enlisted Langmuir in the effort to improve GE's light bulbs, letting him decide how to go about it. Langmuir tried exploring the fate of small amounts of gases introduced into a nearly evacuated light bulb. This
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