William Ramsay Biography

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World of Chemistry on William Ramsay

The first two decades of William Ramsay's career were spent on a variety of comparatively insignificant studies, including work on the alkaloids, water loss in salts, the solubility of gases in solids, and a class of organic compounds known as the diketones. It was not until 1892 that he became engaged in the line of research for which he was eventually to win a Nobel Prize, the study of the inert gases . Those studies were to occupy Ramsay for most of the next decade and to win him worldwide fame for his participation in the discovery of five new chemical elements.

Ramsay was born on October 2, 1852, at Queen's Crescent, Glasgow, Scotland. He was the only child of William Ramsay, a civil engineer, and the former Catharine Robertson, who came from a family of physicians. In spite of this scientific background, young William showed no particular interest in the sciences and had a classical liberal education at Glasgow Academy.

When he entered the University of Glasgow at the age of fourteen in 1866, Ramsay chose to remain in a classical curriculum that included literature, logic, and mathematics, thinking that he might join the clergy. Over a period of time, however, his interests shifted toward the sciences and, from 1869 to 1870, he worked as an apprentice to a local chemist, Robert Tatlock. At the end of this period, Ramsay was ready to make a commitment to a career in chemistry, and in 1871 he enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Tübingen under the noted organic chemist Rudolf Fittig. Ramsay received his Ph.D. from Tübingen only a year later at the early age of nineteen for a study of toluic and nitrotoluic acids.

After receiving his degree, Ramsay returned to Glasgow and became a research assistant at Anderson's College (later the Royal Technical College). At Anderson's, Ramsay's work dealt primarily with organic chemistry, especially with compounds related to quinine and cinchonine. Six years later, in 1880, he was appointed professor of chemistry at University College, Bristol (later, Bristol University). During his seven years at Bristol, Ramsay worked with an assistant, Sydney Young, on the relationships between the physical properties of a liquid and the liquid's molecular weight.

Ramsay's appointment in 1887 as professor of chemistry at University College, London, marked a turning point in his career. For a few years he continued to work on a variety of problems, such as surface tension, the metallic compounds of ethylene, and the atomic weight of boron. But then, in late 1892, Ramsay was confronted with a puzzle that was to captivate him. That puzzle went back to a discovery made by Henry Cavendish in 1785. Cavendish had found that the compete removal of oxygen and nitrogen from a sample of air still left a small bubble of some additional unknown gas. The puzzle was confounded by the work of Robert Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) in the late 1880s that showed the density of nitrogen to be slightly different depending on whether the gas came from air or from a compound of nitrogen.

Ramsay decided to resolve this dilemma. He began by removing all of the nitrogen and oxygen from a sample of air by burning magnesium metal (which reacts with both) in the air. He found a small bubble of gas, similar to that reported by Cavendish a century earlier. But then Ramsay took an additional step that Cavendish could not have taken: he did a spectroscopic analysis of the gas bubble. The result of that analysis was a set of spectral lines that had never been seen before--the gas bubble was clearly a new element. Because of the inertness of the element, Ramsay suggested the name argon for the element, from the Greek argos, for "lazy."

The discovery of argon immediately posed new research possibilities. Determination of the element's atomic weight placed it between chlorine and potassium in the periodic table. Clearly the element was located in a new column in the table, a column that Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev could never have imagined when he proposed the periodic law in 1869. The challenge that Ramsay recognized was to locate other members of this new chemical family, those that made up column "0" (or column 18) in the periodic table.

Shortly after announcing the discovery of argon, Ramsay heard about another inert gas that had been discovered by the American chemist William Hillebrand. To see if Hillebrand's gas might also be argon, Ramsay heated a sample of the mineral clevite in sulfuric acid and had the gas produced tested by spectroscopic analysis. The results of that analysis showed that the gas was not argon, but it did have the same spectral lines as those of an element discovered in the sun in 1868 by Pierre Janssen and Joseph Lockyer , an element they had named helium. Ramsay's research showed that helium also existed on the Earth.

Over the next few years, Ramsay looked for the remaining missing inert gases in various minerals, always without success. Then in 1898 he decided on another approach. He and a colleague, Morris Travers, prepared fifteen liters of liquid argon, which they then allowed to evaporate very slowly. Eventually they identified three more new gases, krypton, neon, and xenon, which they announced to the world on June 6, June 16, and September 8, 1898, respectively.

Ramsay remained at London until his retirement in 1912. During the last decade of his tenure there, he became increasingly interested in radioactivity. Among his discoveries in this field was one made with Frederick Soddy in 1903, namely that helium is always a product of the radioactive decay of radium. This discovery was later explained when it was found that the alpha particles emitted by a radioactive substance are actually positively charged helium ions. In conjunction with Robert Whytlaw-Gray, Ramsay also determined the atomic weight of the one inert gas in whose discovery he was not involved, radon.

Ramsay was married to Margaret Buchanan in August, 1881; they had two children. After the outbreak of World War I, Ramsay attempted to carry on chemical research for military applications, but his health failed rapidly and he died on July 23, 1916, at his home in Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire, England. In addition to the 1904 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of the rare gases, Ramsay was awarded the 1895 Davy Medal of the Royal Society and the 1903 August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal of the German Chemical Society. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1888 and was knighted in 1902.