Irving Langmuir named plasma after blood and coined 'pathological science'
Studying glowing ionised gas inside lamps, Irving Langmuir thought it resembled blood plasma and gave the state of matter its name. The Nobel-winning chemist also made light bulbs last longer, pioneered cloud seeding, and in 1953 coined a phrase for honest research led astray by wishful thinking: pathological science.
Langmuir was born in Brooklyn on 31 January 1881. When poor eyesight was diagnosed and corrected at eleven, a world of previously missed detail sharpened his curiosity, and his older brother Arthur, a research chemist, helped him set up a bedroom laboratory. He studied metallurgical engineering at Columbia and earned a PhD at Göttingen in 1906, working with an electric lamp invented by Walther Nernst. Outside the lab he climbed mountains, skied, flew his own plane and campaigned for wilderness conservation.
At General Electric from 1909 to 1950, lamps led everywhere. He improved the diffusion pump, paving the way for high-vacuum electronic tubes. With Lewi Tonks he found that filling bulbs with an inert gas like argon greatly extended tungsten filament life, provided every step was kept scrupulously clean, and coiling the filament raised efficiency. Studying charged particles boiling off hot filaments drew him into ionised gases; he and Tonks discovered the electron density oscillations now called Langmuir waves, and in 1924 he invented the Langmuir probe for measuring plasma temperature and density. He also discovered atomic hydrogen and used it for the first plasma weld.
His Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 rewarded surface chemistry. A 1917 paper showed that certain oils spread on water as films one molecule thick, water-loving ends down, allowing molecular shapes to be probed before spectroscopy. With Katharine Blodgett he developed the idea of the monolayer. His 1919 paper on electron arrangement popularised a theory of atomic structure, though credit belongs mostly to Gilbert Lewis, which caused a priority dispute.
Later he turned to the atmosphere. He debunked a claim that the deer botfly flies over 800 miles per hour, estimating 25. Seaweed windrows in the Sargasso Sea led him to the wind-driven Langmuir circulation. With Vincent Schaefer he showed that dry ice and silver iodide can make supercooled clouds release precipitation, though how well cloud seeding works remains contested. He died on 16 August 1957.
Source: Irving Langmuir
