Word: langmuir
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...