From left to right, Irving Langmuir, Willis R. Whitney, and William D. Coolidge, 1909.

     It has been deemed wise during the past year to establish a laboratory devoted
          exclusively to original research.  It is hoped by this means that many profitable
          fields may be discovered.

With this,the company announced to the world an experiment that begun in December, 1900, when a 32-year old chemistry professor from MIT named Willis R. Whitney had set up his experimental apparatus in a barn behind the Schenectady home of Charles Proteus Steinmetz. His original doubts about the permanence of the post are reflected in Whitney's insistence on retaining his MIT position, and accepting on a two-days-a-week basis the challenges of proving the value of science to the electrical industry. But within a year, the challenges of industry had become the main focus of his activity, and within four years he had formally committed himself to industrial research.

By then he had proved his value. His invention of the GEM lamp made the biggest advance in the efficiency of incandescent lighting since the work of Edison. But it was challenged by a number of promising lighting innovations: the "glower" invented by the great German chemist Walther Nernst: the mercury vapor arc; and a group of metal-filament lamps. To meet the lighting challenge, Whitney sought an outstanding researcher to head his laboratory's efforts at perfecting the application of the most promising metal - tungsten - for lighting purposes.

He found the man he needed in the MIT chemistry laboratory. William D. Coolidge had, like Whitney, earned a Ph.D degree at the University of Leipzig(Germany). Like Whitney, he had done his first major scientific work under the outstanding MIT chemist Arthur A. Noyes. But there the resemblances ended. Where Whitney was charming, charismatic and outgoing, Coolidge was quiet, careful and modest. His determination and experimental skill made him ideally suited to head the tungsten wire that has remained ever since the key to the manufacturing of lamp filaments.

The presence of ductile tungsten and outstanding high vacuum techniques made the GE Research Lab a place of great opportunity for capable scientific researcher. Irving Langmuir, a Brooklyn-born chemist trained at the University of Gottingen, trapped in an unsatisfying teaching post, seized the opportunity in the summer of 1909. Finding that, as a summer employee under Whitney, he was allowed far more freedom than he enjoyed in a university, he gladly accepted a full-time post. He quickly blossomed both as an inventor and as a scientist. His research in 1912 and 1913 produced the gas-filled lamp, a fundamental advance in lighting, and improvements in the vacuum tube which helped make possible modern electronics and radio. Even more important were his contributions to surface chemistry, recognized by the award of the 1932 Nobel Prize. A proud, independent man, he appeared the picture of the aloof, absent-minded scientist to the outsiders but inspired colleagues with his enthusiasm and scientific instinct. Langmuir did more than any other individual to prove value of industrial research to both industry and science.

Behind the scientific triumphs of Langmuir, and the inventive genius of Coolidge (who, in 1913, added to his laurels the invention of the modern X-ray tube) stood the inspiration provided by Whitney. "Are you having fun?" he would ask on his daily tours of the laboratory. But at the same time, he knew that behind the fun lay a responsibility. "I know that I was put here for a purpose," he wrote in 1901:

      The company is not primarily a philanthropic asylum for the indigent chemists 
            and I must not let it become one even secondarily.

The work of Whitney, Coolidge and Langmuir proved that the support of science, far from being charity, was the soundest of business decisions.

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