The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1932 was awarded to Irving Langmuir "for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry".
 

The phenomenon of adsorption has been known and has been studied for many years. Surface chemistry as the designation of a special discipline within physical chemistry is a comparatively new conception. One of these phenomena is that of adsorption. According to this theory the layer of gas adsorbed is limited - in ideal border-line cases at least - to an extremely thin film of gas molecules extending over a single plane, thus a film whose thickness is that of a single molecule or, in other words, is monomolecular. Another experimenter has allowed a known surface of metallic gold to adsorb air during the transition from a very high vacuum to ordinary atmospheric pressure.