William Ramsay

William Ramsay was born on 2 October 1852 in Glasgow, Scotland, and died on 23 July 1916 in High Wycombe, England. He earned a PhD at Tubingen in 1872, then held the principalship and chemistry chair at University College, Bristol, from 1880, moving to the chair of inorganic chemistry at University College, London, in 1887, where he stayed until his retirement in 1913. In 1894, working with the physicist Lord Rayleigh to explain a small, reproducible density discrepancy Rayleigh had noticed between nitrogen extracted from air and nitrogen prepared from chemical compounds, Ramsay isolated a new, chemically unreactive gas from air; the two named it argon and published jointly. Ramsay then found the rest of the noble gas family largely on his own: helium in a uranium mineral in 1895 (already detected spectroscopically in the sun in 1868 but not before found on Earth), and neon, krypton and xenon, all in 1898, followed later by radon with Frederick Soddy in 1904. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of discovering the inert gaseous elements in air and determining their place in the periodic system, awarded the same year Rayleigh received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the same underlying discovery.