William Ramsay

William Ramsay was a British chemist born 2 October 1852, working in an era when the atmosphere still held secrets. Collaborating with John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, he identified argon in the mid-1890s — the first hint that a whole class of elements had been missed. Ramsay didn't stop there: he systematically isolated helium, neon, krypton, and xenon from air, each one chemically inert and invisible to prior methods. The work earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 for discovering the inert gaseous elements, while Rayleigh took the Physics prize the same year. His haul of no…