Irving Langmuir

Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) was an American chemist and engineer who spent most of his career in the research laboratory of the General Electric Company at Schenectady, New York. Born in Brooklyn, he graduated as a metallurgical engineer from the School of Mines at Columbia University in 1903 and took his doctorate under Walther Nernst at Gottingen in 1906. After teaching at the Stevens Institute of Technology he joined General Electric in 1909 and eventually became its associate director of research. His studies of filaments in gases led directly to the gas-filled incandescent lamp and to the discovery of atomic hydrogen, which he later used to develop the atomic hydrogen welding process. He also described adsorbed monatomic films on tungsten and platinum and formulated a general theory of adsorbed films. For his work in surface chemistry he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932.