Irving Langmuir, (born Jan. 31, 1881, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 16, 1957, Falmouth, Mass.), American physical chemist who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry “for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry.” He was the second American and the first industrial chemist to receive this honour. Besides surface chemistry, his scientific research, spanning more than 50 years, included chemical reactions, thermal effects, and electrical discharges in gases; atomic structure; surface phenomena in a vacuum; and atmospheric science.
Early Life And Education
Langmuir was the third of 4 sons of Charles Langmuir, an insurance coverage govt, and Sadie Comings. Both of his mother and father have been inveterate file keepers, and he developed this behavior himself whereas nonetheless younger. He attended colleges in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, in addition to Paris throughout his father’s three-year firm task in Europe. Interested in chemistry, physics, and arithmetic from his youth, Langmuir selected a serious in metallurgical engineering at Columbia University in New York City as a result of that curriculum, as he later stated, “was strong in chemistry…had more physics than the chemical course, and more mathematics than the course in physics—and I wanted all three.”
After graduating from Columbia’s School of Mines in 1903, Langmuir studied with bodily chemist Walther Nernst on the University of Göttingen in Germany. His dissertation centered on the dissociation of gases close to a scorching platinum wire, for which he acquired a doctorate in 1906. As a scholar, he was influenced not solely by Nernst, who typically sought sensible functions of his elementary analysis, but in addition by the mathematician Felix Klein, who advocated using arithmetic as a device and promoted the interplay between theoretical science and its sensible functions. During his years in Germany, Langmuir frequented the mountains for snowboarding within the winter and for climbing in the summertime. Such out of doors actions remained lifelong pursuits for him.
Finding A Career
After returning to the United States, Langmuir turned an teacher on the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., however he didn't discover his three years there significantly satisfying. His instructing duties left him little time for analysis, and he was not paid what he thought he was value. He rapidly realized that this was not the avenue to the scientific repute and monetary safety that he sought.In the summer time of 1909, as an alternative of a mountaineering trip, Langmuir labored on the General Electric Company’s analysis laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. Enticed by the corporate’s dedication to elementary analysis, the latitude given to the scientists working there, and the provision of apparatus, Langmuir accepted an invite to stay. At first he apparently supposed to search out one other tutorial place, however he stayed at General Electric for the remainder of his profession, retiring in 1950 however persevering with as a guide till his demise.
Major Research
Improving the early tungsten-filament incandescent gentle bulbs was one of many ongoing initiatives on the analysis lab in 1909. These high-vacuum bulbs had a number of drawbacks: their glass envelopes blackened over time, thus decreasing their illumination, and the tungsten filaments have been comparatively short-lived. While different staff on the laboratory believed that a greater vacuum would lengthen the bulbs’ lives, Langmuir started to analyze the behaviour of gases close to a scorching tungsten filament. The blackening of the bulbs, he found, resulted from the deposition of tungsten that evaporated from the new filament, and an environment of inert gasoline throughout the bulb—a mix of nitrogen and argon labored finest—decreased the issue. This, together with Langmuir’s growth of an improved design for the tungsten filament, led to a much-improved and commercially profitable incandescent bulb.
Among the gases that Langmuir studied was hydrogen. A scorching tungsten filament quickly cools within the presence of this gasoline, and he postulated the trigger to be the dissociation of hydrogen molecules into atoms. When he later learn concerning the heating attributable to the recombination of hydrogen atoms into molecules at strong surfaces, he mixed this along with his earlier work to develop an atomic hydrogen welding torch, which generates excessive temperatures by way of the dissociation and subsequent recombination of hydrogen.
Langmuir’s research of gases close to scorching metallic surfaces additionally led him to analyze thermionic emission—the ejection of electrons from a heated floor—and the behaviour of surfaces in a vacuum. These investigations resulted in theoretical advances in describing the spatial distribution of cost between a pair of electrodes and sensible enhancements to hoover tubes, in addition to the invention of a quick and environment friendly vacuum pump.
The largest physique of Langmuir’s work concerned the behaviour of molecules at strong and liquid surfaces. He laid the groundwork for his prize-winning work on floor chemistry as early as 1916–17 with necessary publications on the adsorption, condensation, and evaporation of gasoline molecules at strong surfaces and on the preparations of molecules within the floor layers of liquids. These research, like most of his investigations, confirmed his penchant for easy experimental designs coupled with in depth mathematical evaluation. After 1932 Langmuir returned to his earlier curiosity in liquid surfaces and, collectively along with his collaborators Katherine Blodgett and Vincent Schaefer, examined the monomolecular layers of assorted natural compounds on the floor of water. Blodgett developed a technique for transferring such a monolayer to a strong floor, and the successive buildup of monolayers turned often called a Langmuir-Blodgett movie. This approach proved vital in later biophysical research of the membranes of residing cells.
Working independently of the American atomic chemist Gilbert N. Lewis, Langmuir formulated theories of atomic construction and chemical bond formation, often called the Lewis-Langmuir principle of molecular construction, and launched the time period covalence.
Meteorology Research
During World War II, Langmuir labored on the issue of airplane deicing at a station on the summit of Mount Washington, N.H. With Schaefer, he additionally investigated the manufacturing of particles of assorted sizes and their behaviour within the ambiance and in filters. These research led to improved strategies for producing smokescreens by the army, in addition to to his subsequent curiosity in climate modification by seeding clouds with small particles. Some of his experiments in seeding clouds preceded a heavy snowfall in Schenectady within the winter of 1946 and heavy rainfall close to Albuquerque, N.M., on a day in July 1949 when no substantial rain was predicted. Whether there was any connection between the seeding and the next precipitation, nevertheless, remained controversial.
Avocations And Awards
This tour into experimental meteorology was a part of Langmuir’s curiosity in “science out-of-doors,” which concerned his shut commentary and clarification of many pure on a regular basis phenomena. An avid outdoorsman, he loved climbing, mountaineering, snowboarding, swimming, and boating all through a lot of his life. He discovered to pilot a airplane at age 49 and was a private buddy of Charles Lindbergh. He was additionally a buddy of the musical conductor Leopold Stokowski, with whom he labored to enhance the standard of radio broadcasts of orchestral music.
Langmuir was an ardent conservationist and an advocate for the management of atomic power, in addition to an unsuccessful candidate to Schenectady’s metropolis council and an organizer of the Boy Scouts in that metropolis. In 1912 he married Marion Mersereau of South Orange, N.J., they usually adopted two youngsters. He concerned his household in lots of his hobbies and out of doors actions. He died of a coronary heart assault whereas vacationing at Cape Cod, Mass.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Langmuir was the recipient of quite a few awards and greater than a dozen honorary levels. He served as president of each the American Chemical Society (1929) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1941). Since his demise, a mountain in Alaska, a residential faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the floor chemistry journal printed by the American Chemical Society have been named for him. Described because the quintessential industrial researcher, Langmuir himself claimed that his accomplishments got here from his working “for the fun of it.”