Irving Langmuir

Irving Langmuir (born Jan. 31, 1881, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 16, 1957, Falmouth, Mass.) was an 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 four sons of Charles Langmuir, an insurance executive, and Sadie Comings. Both of his parents were inveterate record keepers, and he developed this habit himself while still young. He attended schools in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, as well as Paris during his father’s three-year company assignment in Europe. Interested in chemistry, physics, and mathematics from his youth, Langmuir chose a major in metallurgical engineering at Columbia University in New York City because that curriculum, as he later said, “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 physical chemist Walther Nernst at the University of Göttingen in Germany. His dissertation focused on the dissociation of gases near a hot platinum wire, for which he received a doctorate in 1906. As a student, he was influenced not only by Nernst, who often sought practical applications of his fundamental research, but also by the mathematician Felix Klein, who advocated the use of mathematics as a tool and promoted the interaction between theoretical science and its practical applications. During his years in Germany, Langmuir frequented the mountains for skiing in the winter and for climbing in the summer. Such outdoor activities remained lifelong interests for him.

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Finding a career

After returning to the United States, Langmuir became an instructor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., but he did not find his three years there particularly satisfying. His teaching duties left him little time for research, and he was not paid what he thought he was worth. He quickly realized that this was not the avenue to the scientific reputation and financial security that he sought.

In the summer of 1909, instead of a mountain climbing vacation, Langmuir worked at the General Electric Company’s research laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. Enticed by the company’s commitment to fundamental research, the latitude given to the scientists working there, and the availability of equipment, Langmuir accepted an invitation to remain. At first he apparently intended to find another academic position, but he stayed at General Electric for the rest of his career, retiring in 1950 but continuing as a consultant until his death.

Major research

Improving the early tungsten-filament incandescent light bulbs was one of the ongoing projects at the research lab in 1909. These high-vacuum bulbs had several drawbacks: their glass envelopes blackened over time, thus reducing their illumination, and the tungsten filaments were relatively short-lived. While other workers at the laboratory believed that a better vacuum would lengthen the bulbs’ lives, Langmuir began to investigate the behaviour of gases near a hot tungsten filament. The blackening of the bulbs, he discovered, resulted from the deposition of tungsten that evaporated from the hot filament, and an atmosphere of inert gas within the bulb—a mixture of nitrogen and argon worked best—reduced the problem. This, along with Langmuir’s development of an improved design for the tungsten filament, led to a much-improved and commercially successful incandescent bulb.

Among the gases that Langmuir studied was hydrogen. A hot tungsten filament rapidly cools in the presence of this gas, and he postulated the cause to be the dissociation of hydrogen molecules into atoms. When he later read about the heating caused by the recombination of hydrogen atoms into molecules at solid surfaces, he combined this with his earlier work to develop an atomic hydrogen welding torch, which generates high temperatures through the dissociation and subsequent recombination of hydrogen.

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Langmuir’s study of gases near hot metal surfaces also led him to investigate thermionic emission—the ejection of electrons from a heated surface—and the behaviour of surfaces in a vacuum. These investigations resulted in theoretical advances in describing the spatial distribution of charge between a pair of electrodes and practical improvements to vacuum tubes, as well as the invention of a fast and efficient vacuum pump.

The largest body of Langmuir’s work involved the behaviour of molecules at solid and liquid surfaces. He laid the groundwork for his prize-winning work on surface chemistry as early as 1916–17 with important publications on the adsorption, condensation, and evaporation of gas molecules at solid surfaces and on the arrangements of molecules in the surface layers of liquids. These studies, like most of his investigations, showed his penchant for simple experimental designs coupled with extensive mathematical analysis. After 1932 Langmuir returned to his earlier interest in liquid surfaces and, together with his collaborators Katherine Blodgett and Vincent Schaefer, examined the monomolecular layers of various organic compounds on the surface of water. Blodgett developed a method for transferring such a monolayer to a solid surface, and the successive buildup of monolayers became known as a Langmuir-Blodgett film. This technique proved significant in later biophysical studies of the membranes of living cells.

Working independently of the American atomic chemist Gilbert N. Lewis, Langmuir formulated theories of atomic structure and chemical bond formation, known as the Lewis-Langmuir theory of molecular structure, and introduced the term covalence.

Meteorology research

During World War II, Langmuir worked on the problem of airplane deicing at a station on the summit of Mount Washington, N.H. With Schaefer, he also investigated the production of particles of various sizes and their behaviour in the atmosphere and in filters. These studies led to improved methods for generating smokescreens by the military, as well as to his subsequent interest in weather modification by seeding clouds with small particles. Some of his experiments in seeding clouds preceded a heavy snowfall in Schenectady in the winter of 1946 and heavy rainfall near 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 subsequent precipitation, however, remained controversial.

Avocations and awards

This excursion into experimental meteorology was part of Langmuir’s interest in “science out-of-doors,” which involved his close observation and explanation of many natural everyday phenomena. An avid outdoorsman, he enjoyed hiking, mountain climbing, skiing, swimming, and boating throughout much of his life. He learned to pilot a plane at age 49 and was a personal friend of Charles Lindbergh. He was also a friend of the musical conductor Leopold Stokowski, with whom he worked to improve the quality of radio broadcasts of orchestral music.

Langmuir was an ardent conservationist and an advocate for the control of atomic energy, as well as an unsuccessful candidate to Schenectady’s city council and an organizer of the Boy Scouts in that city. In 1912 he married Marion Mersereau of South Orange, N.J., and they adopted two children. He involved his family in many of his hobbies and outdoor activities. He died of a heart attack while vacationing at Cape Cod, Mass.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Langmuir was the recipient of numerous awards and more than a dozen honorary degrees. He served as president of both the American Chemical Society (1929) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1941). Since his death, a mountain in Alaska, a residential college of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the surface chemistry journal published by the American Chemical Society have been named for him. Described as the quintessential industrial researcher, Langmuir himself claimed that his accomplishments came from his working “for the fun of it.”