William Ramsay
Scottish chemist (1852-1916) · United Kingdom · Scientists · Died at 63
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Something wrong?He found a family of elements hiding in plain air - gases so inert they had slipped past every chemist before him, earning a Nobel and rewriting the periodic table.
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William Ramsay
200 y Anniversary of Berlin Academy 1900
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Chemistry - a Text-Book for High Schools - DPLA - ccd32b9687492e38e9c91fd1e4b71229 (page 31)
Leslie Ward - Vanity Fair - Doctors and Scientists ^Chemistry^ Sir William Ramsay 2 December 1908 - B1979.14.193 - Yale Center for British Art
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About this person
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 noble gases created an entirely new section of the periodic table. He died 23 July 1916.
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