Sir William Ramsay

Sir William Ramsay was the Glasgow-born chemist who discovered an entire missing family of elements, the noble gases, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. In the space of four years he and his collaborators added argon, helium, neon, krypton and xenon to the periodic table, filling a gap that nobody had even known was there.

A Glasgow boyhood

Ramsay was born in Glasgow on 2 October 1852, the only child of a civil engineer. He was educated at Glasgow Academy and matriculated at the University of Glasgow at just fourteen. For a time he was even apprenticed to the great shipbuilder Robert Napier before chemistry won him over. After further study he took his doctorate at Tübingen in Germany, then returned to Glasgow as an assistant at Anderson’s College, the beginning of a career in science and teaching.

The missing elements

The great work came later, at University College London. In 1894, puzzling over why nitrogen drawn from the air was heavier than nitrogen made in the laboratory, Ramsay and the physicist Lord Rayleigh isolated a new and utterly unreactive gas, and named it argon. Within four years Ramsay had gone on to isolate helium, until then known only in the light of the sun, and, working with Morris Travers, neon, krypton and xenon. Together these formed a whole new column of the periodic table.

The Nobel Prize

In 1904 Ramsay was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery, the first Briton ever to win it, while Rayleigh took the Physics prize the same year. Ramsay had been knighted two years before. In the course of his experiments he even switched on what is often called the world’s first neon light. He retired in 1913 and died in England in 1916, remembered as one of the greatest scientists the city has produced, a fitting figure from the university we look at in our post on the age of the University of Glasgow.