“We noticed the similarity of the discharge structures. (…) Langmuir pointed out the importance and probable wide bearing of this fact. We struggled to find a name for it. For all members of the team realized that the credit for a discovery goes not to the man who makes it, but to the man who names it. Witness the name of our continent. We tossed around names like ‘uniform discharge’, ‘homogeneous discharge’, ‘equilibrium discharge’; and for the dark or light regions surrounding electrodes, names like ‘auras’, haloes’, and so forth. But one day Langmuir came in triumphantly and said he had it. He pointed out that the ‘equilibrium’ part of the discharge acted as a sort of sub-stratum carrying particles of special kinds, like high-velocity electrons from thermionic filaments, molecules and ions of gas impurities. This reminds him of the way blood plasma carries around red and white corpuscles and germs. So he proposed to call our ‘uniform discharge’ a ‘plasma’. Of course we all agreed.But then we were in for it. For a long time we were pestered by requests from medical journals for reprints of our articles.
