Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Dr. Irving Langmuir of General Electric is going skiing over the hills back of Stockholm next month,'if events do not interfere. But his serious reason for traveling the thousands of miles between Stockholm and Schenectady will be to receive the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry ($30,000) which the Swedish Academy of Science assigned him last week.

No one with General Electric was happier over Dr. Langmuir's new honor than Dr. William David Coolidge. Drs. Coolidge and Langmuir are good old friends and General Electric collaborators. They have worked together in the same laboratory the past 23 years. Dr. Langmuir now holds the top place in U. S. chemical learning. (Only other U. S. savant to earn a Nobel Prize for Chemistry was Harvard's late Professor Theodore William Richards, 1914.) On the other hand Dr. Coolidge last fortnight attained what may well be considered the top job of U. S. industrial scientific research,* when President Gerard Swope made Dr. Coolidge director of General Electric's research laboratories (TIME, Nov. 14). As such Director Coolidge is Laureate Langmuir's boss. Precisely, Dr. Langmuir received his award for "pioneer work in surface chemistry." This refers to his useful concept of the arrangement and orientation of molecules at the surface of objects--how, for example, gases react at the surface of a hot tungsten wire. This led him directly to the invention of the gas-filled incandecent lamp which saves U. S. users of electricity, according to estimates. $1.000,000 a night. The same concept led to his creating almost complete vacuums in thermionic tubes. To do this he was obliged to design a new powerful mercury pump. Result is cheap, highly efficient vacuum tubes for radio, and long distance telephony. Another result was Dr. Coolidge's perfection of dependable x-ray tubes and his design of tandem x-ray', tubes whose radiation is almost as powerful as radium's gamma rays. (Manhattan's Memorial Hospital is using a 900,000-volt Coolidge tube to treat cancer.)

Dr. Langmuir's investigation along this line led him to utilize hydrogen for welding metals together. When hydrogen is squirted through a tungsten arc light, hydrogen molecules explode into hydrogen atoms. The hot stream of atomic hydrogen can weld pieces of steel together and simultaneously drive away the oxygen and nitrogen which weaken ordinary steel welds.

When Dr. Langmuir was young he was "that inquisitive boy," a nuisance to his aunts. 'He probably proceeded into chemistry instead of some other science because his older brother, who was studying chemistry, answered questions, helped him equip a child's chemistry laboratory. That older brother is now Dr. Arthur Comings Langmuir, shellac & glycerine expert, donor of the $1,000 Langmuir prize for precocity in chemistry.

Dr. Irving Langmuir at 51 remains inquisitive. His current scientific fun is to study the formation of ice on Lake George, N. Y. where he has a camp. Somehow wintertime always fascinated him. He learned to ski and sail-skate in Switzerland, has skiied throughout the Catskills and Adirondacks, climbed Mounts Washington and Marcy on skiis.

* Top job of U. S. industrial engineering is with little discussion, Charles Franklin Kctter-ing's, the presidency of General Motors Research Corporation.

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