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Irving Langmuir ( January 31, 1881 in Brooklyn, New York - August 16, 1957 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts) was an American chemist and physicist. While at G.E., from 1909-1950, Langmuir advanced several basic fields of physics and chemistry, invented the gas filled incandescent lamp, the hydrogen welding technique, and was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in surface chemistry.
He graduated with a B.S. from the Columbia University School of Mines in 1903 and did postgraduate work in chemistry under Nobel laureate Walther Nernst in Göttingen and earned his Ph.D. degree in 1906. Langmuir then taught at Stevens Institute of TechnologyStevens Institute of Technology is an educational institution located on a 55 acre (223,000 m˛) campus in Hoboken, New Jersey, founded in 1870 on the basis of an 1868 bequest from Edwin A. Stevens Institute is built on Castle Point, the highpoint of Hobok in Hoboken, New JerseyHoboken is a densely populated city on the west bank of the Hudson River in Hudson County, New Jersey, just across from Manhattan. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 38,577. Geography Hoboken is located at 40°44'41" North, 74°1'59", until 1909, when he began working at the General ElectricGeneral Electric Company or GE is a multinational technology and services company, one of the world's largest corporations. While it still uses its full name for legal purposes, it prefers to use the abbreviation GE in the names of its component businesse research laboratory ( Schenectady, New YorkSchenectady is a city located in Schenectady County, New York, of which it is the county seat. It is a city in central New York State, near the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers. It is in the same metropolitan area as the state capital, Albany, N).
Langmuir married Marion Mersereau in 1912. They had a son, Kenneth, and a daughter, Barbara.
His initial contributions to science came from his study of light bulbs (which was a continuation of his Ph.D. work). First his improvement of vacuum techniques led to the invention of the high- vacuum tubeIn electronics, a vacuum tube (American English) or thermionic) valve (British English) is a device generally used to amplify a signal. Once used in most electronic devices, vacuum tubes are now used only in specialized applications. For most purposes, th. A year later he discovered that the lifetime of a tungstenThis article is about the chemical element. Tungsten may also refer to the Tungsten Handheld PDA. Tungsten (formerly Wolfram is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol W ( L. Wolframium and atomic number 74. A very hard, heavy, steel- filament was greatly lengthened by filling the bulb with an inert gas, such as argonArgon was also a codename used for the KH-5 reconnaissance satellite. Argon is the chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol Ar and atomic number 18. The third noble gas, in period 8, argon makes up about 1% of the Earth's atmosphere., which is an important part of the modern day incandescent light bulb.
As he continued to study filaments in vacuum and different gas environments he began to study the emission of charged particles from hot filaments (thermionic emission). He was one of the first scientists to work with plasmas and was the first to call these ionized gases by that name.
He introduced the concept of electron temperature and in 1924 invented the diagnostic method for measuring both temperature and density with a thermionic probe, now called a Langmuir probe and commonly used in plasma physics. The current of a biased probe tip is measured as a function of bias voltage to determine the local plasma temperature and density.
He also discovered atomic hydrogen, which he put to use by inventing the atomic hydrogen welding process.
