The Ramsay Centenary

THE Ramsay Centenary revived many memories of the excitement produced by the announcement of the discovery of argon at the British Association meeting at Oxford in August 1894, and of the incredulity freely expressed in certain quarters about the discovery during the interval before the joint paper by Rayleigh and Ramsay was read to the Royal Society in January 1895, when the critics were silenced. The isolation of the inert gases was one of the great scientific discoveries at the close of the nineteenth century which were to reshape our ideas of the nature of matter early in the next century. Their chemical inertness and their place in the Periodic Table System, in the light of Rutherford’s nuclear atom, provided the key to the problem of the chemical affinity of the other atoms for one another. The story of their discovery is simple. Lord Rayleigh in 1882 planned an investigation to examine whether the relative atomic weights of oxygen and hydrogen really deviated from the simple ratio 1 : 16 demanded by Prout’s Law. Later on this was extended to the measurement of the densities of other gases including nitrogen. He asked Ramsay how to prepare nitrogen from sources other than air and to his surprise he found that its density was slightly less than that of nitrogen from the atmosphere

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