Point of Interest Irving Langmuir

In 1917, he published his seminal paper on the chemistry of oil films that later became the basis for the award of the 1932 Nobel Prize in chemistry. He was the first industrial chemist to become a Nobel laureate. 

Langmuir theorized that oils consisting of an aliphatic chain with a hydrophilic end group were oriented as a film one molecule thick upon the surface of water, with the hydrophilic group immersed in the water and the hydrophobic chains aggregated together on 

As he continued to study filaments in vacuum and different gas environments, he began to study the emission of charged particles from hot filaments (thermionic emission). He was one of the first scientists to work with plasmas and was the first to call these ionized gases by that name, because they reminded him of blood plasma. Langmuir and Tonks discovered electron density waves in plasmas that are now known as Langmuir waves. 

He joined Katharine B. Blodgett to study thin films and surface adsorption. They introduced the concept of a monolayer (a layer of material one molecule thick) and the two-dimensional physics which describe such a surface. 

The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research near Socorro, New Mexico, was named in his honor as was the American Chemical Society journal for surface science, called Langmuir. 

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