The 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.
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