Growing up, Roger Summerhayes '78 always knew that his grandfather, Irving Langmuir, had won the Nobel Prize in 1932.
He just didn't know what that meant. “I thought it was sort of like winning a science fair,” he says.
Now, Summerhayes is well aware of the importance of Langmuir's work and his Nobel Prize — so aware that he has made an award-winning documentary film about the General Electric scientist's life. Called Langmuir's World, the film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and has also been shown locally on WMHT-TV, the PBS member station.
The idea for the film came to Summerhayes while he was at Union. A chemistry major, he began to understand the significance of the discoveries that Langmuir had made in his chemistry courses. But the real trigger was his grandfather's sixteen-millimeter family films.
“My grandfather had shot all of this film that sat in a closet in the Langmuir house where I grew up,” Summerhayes explains. “My father would occasionally pull out a reel and we would watch it. It was beautiful stuff.” There were eighteen hours of film dating from 1923 to 1957 of Langmuir relaxing in Lake George, playing with his children, skiing across the frozen lake.
“But then I started to look more closely,” Summerhayes says. “Among the family films was one of my grandfather at a conference in Brussels with Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Niels Bohr. That's when I began to become excited about it; I knew that this was a story that needed to be told. The volume of Langmuir's discoveries was just phenomenal, but no one has ever heard of him.”
Summerhayes notes that although the applications of Langmuir's discoveries are very common, his discoveries themselves were very esoteric. Among his accomplishments are improvements to Edison's design for the light bulb, which led to the creation of the incandescent light bulb; his theory of plasma as the fourth stage of matter, after solid, liquid, and gas; and his discovery of atomic-hydrogen welding.
After graduating from Union, Summerhayes kept his grandfather's films in mind, especially when he attended Stanford University to study documentary film. But he did not find the funding for a film about Langmuir until 1995, more than ten years after he began teaching chemistry and physics at St. Croix Country Day School in the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Prior to teaching in St. Croix, Summerhayes spent two years teaching in Fiji with the Peace Corps). That year, he won the Christa McAuliffe Fellowship, receiving enough money to take a year's sabbatical from his teaching job.
Summerhayes discovered that he needed more than just his grandfather's films. Not wanting to have a narrator simply tell the story, he decided to seek out Langmuir's colleagues. Among those whom Summerhayes interviewed was Bernard Vonnegut, who had worked with Langmuir at General Electric's Research and Development Center. “You might want to talk to my brother, the writer; he wrote a book about your grandfather,” Vonnegut told him. Unbeknownst to Summerhayes, Kurt Vonnegut had based a character in his novel Cat's Cradle on Langmuir, and a central element of its story reflects Langmuir's idea that a type of ice might remain solid at room temperature.
“I was floored,” says Summerhayes. “I had no idea. I had read Vonnegut in a satire course at Union during my freshman year and was in awe of this man.”
Summerhayes did interview Kurt Vonnegut and many other colleagues and friends of Langmuir. “They were tremendous and one of the best parts of making the film,” he says. “Until that point, I had all of the pieces but I didn't see the puzzle. As soon as I gathered all of those interviews together, I saw that people kept referring to stories reflected in the silent film my grandfather had shot. Suddenly, things began to match up.”
The result, after more than a year of editing, is a film that was called “a fine historical portrait” by the selection chief for the Sundance Film Festival — and a film that Summerhayes hopes will communicate his grandfather's love of science. “It's not about memorizing facts; it's about the thrill of discovery,” he says.
Summerhayes has no plans to leave teaching and devote his life to making films. He loves teaching and sharing at least a piece of his grandfather's passion for science with his students. “He was so fired up about chemistry. I aspire to communicate some of that enthusiasm to my students,” he says.
Langmuir's World is available for purchase from Roger Summerhayes. For ordering information, call him at 518-761-3669.