The Inquisitive Man

When the school year ended, the serious-faced young chemistry instructor at Hoboken's Stevens Institute of Technology put aside his lecture notes and boarded a train for Schenectady, N.Y. After long months in classroom and lab, even a temporary summer job at the new General Electric Research Laboratory looked good to 28-year-old Brooklyn-born Irving Langmuir, metallurgical engineer (Columbia) and Ph.D. in chemistry (Gottingen). But the job was better than that.

Last week, 40 years later, Chemist-Metallurgist Langmuir announced his retirement as associate director of G.E.'s famed lab. Among his achievements he could count a 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (the first won by a U.S. industrial chemist), awards and honors from many top-drawer scientific organizations, an impressive list of discoveries, and international renown.

Something Interesting. In his youth Dr. Langmuir was described by a harassed aunt as "that inquisitive boy." At Schenectady, G.E. gave his inquisitive nature free rein: he was told not to bother with practical applications, but to look around the laboratory and work on any problem which interested him. On one project he worked for three years, introducing various gases into an incandescent lamp bulb just to see what would happen. In 1912 he made his first important discovery: an electric bulb filled with nitrogen was more efficient than the so-called "vacuum" bulb, since the gas retards evaporation of the tungsten filament. It displaced the old vacuum bulb, saved users of electricity a billion dollars a year.

After learning something about non-vacuum (gas-filled) tubes, Dr. Langmuir decided to reverse his field. His experimenting resulted in a high-vacuum transmitting tube, the heart of modern radio broadcasting.* Further work with gas and heat brought about the atomic hydrogen welding arc, which welds and fuses dissimilar metals.

The Practical Side. Dr. Langmuir experimented in the field of surface chemistry (the arrangement and orientation of molecules at the surface of objects), but what he did appeared at first to be an exercise in pure science. Later, his monomolecular findings contributed to the development of "invisible" glass, and proved helpful in the analysis of certain protein-like compounds.

Dr. Langmuir, now 68, will continue to be a G.E. consultant. He will go on working with Dr. Vincent J. Schaefer on Project Cirrus, the experiments in seeding clouds with chemicals to produce rain, and will dabble in whatever else interests him. Says the man who is still inquisitive: "Whatever work I've done, I've done for the fun of it."

*Neither Langmuir nor G.E. could get a patent on the high-vacuum tube; it was considered only one contribution to the development of high-power tubes.

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