Scope and Content Note
The papers of Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) span the years 1881-1957 and consist of correspondence, experimental notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts of articles and speeches. The collection is organized into ten series: Diaries , Correspondence , Subject File , Laboratory Notebooks , Experimental Sheets , Article and Speech File , Printed Matter , Miscellany , Addition , and Oversize .
Included among the correspondence are letters from Langmuir to his mother while he was studying at the University of Göttingen in 1903-1906. Also in the collection are letters from fellow scientists Niels Bohr, Vannevar Bush, and Willis Rodney Whitney as well as correspondence exchanged with Leopold Stokowski concerning improvements in sound reproduction. The experimental notebooks,1894-1957, contain data relating to the development of the gas-filled incandescent lamp, the high vacuum power tube, atomic hydrogen welding, screening-smoke generators for use of the armed forces, and weather control. The notebooks are supplemented by an extensive Subject File on research topics such as cloud seeding experiments for the artificial production of snow and rain. In the Subject File as well are charts of Lake George in New York, various notebooks, and hundreds of smoked bathythermograph records obtained by Langmuir from Lake George.
The collection also contains drafts of speeches and articles by Langmuir, a small group of published scientific journals collected and annotated by him, newspaper clippings, a card reference file, photographs, and awards.