Word: langmuir
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...