SCANNING OUR PAST Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame

T he Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Irving Langmuir in 1932 in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the understanding of surface chemistry. He spent most of his professional career at the General Electric Research Laboratory (GERL), Schenectady, NY. He became an expert in the theory, design, and applications of electronic tubes, both vacuum and gaseous. He was an active member of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) and served a term as its President during 1923. The son of an insurance salesman and administrator, Irving Langmuir (Fig. 1) was born on January 31, 1881, in Brooklyn, NY. His early education was in Brooklyn and at a boarding school in France where his father was employed from 1892 to 1895. Subsequently, Langmuir attended the Chestnut Hill Academy, Philadelphia, PA, for a year before graduating from the Pratt Institute’s manual training high school in Brooklyn in 1899. He went on to earn a degree in metallurgical engineering at the School of Mines, Columbia University, New York, in 1903. Langmuir continued his education at the University of Gottingen in Germany where his principal mentor was Walther Nernst. Langmuir did his thesis research on the behavior of gases near an incandescent platinum filament. He earned his doctorate in physical chemistry in 1906. Nernst later received a Nobel Prize in 1920 for his contributions to the science of thermodynamics. Langmuir returned to the United States to accept a teaching position at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ. His heavy teaching load left little time for research. He took advantage of an opportunity to spend summer 1909 at the GERL. He enjoyed the experience so much that he quickly gave up his job at Stevens to accept a full-time position at the GERL. Langmuir’s first research project at the GERL concerned the characteristics of experimental electric lamps using tungsten filaments. One of his new colleagues, William D. Coolidge (Fig. 2), had led a successful effort to develop a technique to produce ductile tungsten wire. The newly developed wire was anticipated to enable the manufacture of lamps of higher efficiency than attained previously. Using an experimental setup similar to that he had used in his doctoral thesis research, Langmuir collected data on heat transfer with varying gas pressure and filament temperature. During his investigation, he determined that lamps with inert gas and tungsten filaments were less susceptible to blackening of lamp bulbs than older high-vacuum lamps. He presented a paper titled BThe convection and conduction of heat in gases[ at a meeting to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), Boston, MA, in June 1912. Coolidge gave a paper at the same meeting on applications of ductile tungsten. Lamps using inert gas and tungsten filaments were introduced commercially by GE in 1913. Beginning in 1913, Langmuir became a leading participant in GE’s entry into the field of electronics. In early February 1913, E. F. W. Alexanderson, a GE engineer inventor, arranged to have what he called an Bion controller[ delivered to the GERL. He expressed confidence that Fig. 1. Irving Langmuir (courtesy of the IEEE History Center).