Irving Langmuir

Irving Langmuir was an American chemist and physicist at the General Electric research laboratory who, while investigating why tungsten filament light bulbs blackened and burned out, discovered around 1913 that filling the bulb with an inert gas such as argon instead of using a vacuum sharply extended the filament's life, and that coiling the filament further improved its efficiency. Combined with William Coolidge's ductile tungsten wire, Langmuir's gas-filled lamp became the standard incandescent bulb design for decades. Langmuir spent his career at General Electric from 1909 to 1950, working across surface chemistry, high-vacuum tube technology and plasma physics, and received the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into surface chemistry, work distinct from but conducted alongside his lighting research.