Walther Müller

Walther Müller (6 September 1905, in Hanover – 4 December 1979, in Walnut Creek, California) was a German physicist, most well known for his improvement of Hans Geiger's counter for ionizing radiation, now known as the Geiger-Müller tube.

Walther Müller studied physics, chemistry and philosophy at the University of Kiel. In 1925 he became the first PhD student of Hans Geiger, who had just got a professorship in Kiel. Their work on ionization of gases by collision lead to the invention of the Geiger-Müller counter, a now indispensable tool for measuring radioactive radiation.

After some time as professor at the University of Tübingen he worked for the rest of his professional life as industrial physicist (i.e., a physicist working in industrial R&D) in Germany, then as an advisor for the Australian Postmaster-General's Department Research Laboratories in Melbourne, and then as an industrial physicist in the United States, where he also founded a company to manufacture Geiger–Müller tubes. He died in 1979 in California.