Sir William Ramsay: 11 Facts You Need to Know

Google Doodle commemorates pioneering chemist Sir William Ramsay

1 # Google Doodle pays tribute to the chemist

Sir William Ramsay, the Scottish chemist who has discovered various noble gases, is the subject of today's Google doodle. The noble gases are a group of chemical elements with very low reactivity. They have a wide range of applications, such as refrigerants and anaesthetics, in lighting and MRI scanners to name just a few.

2 # What does the Google Doodle of William Ramsay show?

Google celebrates Sir William Ramsay on what would have been his 167th birthday.

The Doodle describes the logo with the help of the periodic table.

It is made by artist Kevin Laughlin.

3 # Who was Sir William Ramsay?

Ramsay was born in Glasgow on October 2, 1852, and made a name for the discovery of noble gases.

He studied chemistry from a young age and subsequently obtained his PhD at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

After returning to the UK, he worked in a number of colleges before becoming the inorganic chemistry chair at University College in London in 1887.

In that role, he investigated liquids and vapours and published a number of newspapers and books.

4 # Changed the focus of his research

He changed the focus of his research after hearing that British physicist Lord Rayleigh had noticed that nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere had a higher atomic weight than nitrogen in the laboratory.

In 1894, Ramsay heard a lecture from Lord Rayleigh at the Royal Society, in which he reported that nitrogen isolated from the air had a higher density than nitrogen prepared from chemical sources.

5 # Argon discovery

Rayleigh thought this was due to a slight impurity in the chemically produced nitrogen, but Ramsay believed there might be an unknown element in the air. The periodic table that Dmitri Mendeleev had set up in 1869 had only seven groups, but Ramsay suspected that the new element could belong to an as yet unknown eighth group.

Rayleigh and Ramsay both tried to isolate this new element, worked separately but communicated almost daily about their findings. Later that year, they jointly announced the discovery of argon, named after the Greek word for lazy because of its non-reactive quality.

6 # Helium first discovered on Earth by Ramsay in 1895

Helium, the lightest noble gas, had surfaced in spectroscopic observations of the sun and stars, but was first discovered on Earth by Ramsay in 1895. Ramsay searched for sources of argon and treated the mineral cleveite with acid and saw the same spectral line during studying gas released by the reaction. "The excitement of the discovery was so great that Ramsay was obliged to travel to Iceland for a long rest," reports a death announcement.

7 # In 1898 he reported the discovery of three more elements: neon, krypton and xenon.

Sir William Ramsay suspected that there were more inert gases that filled the corresponding spaces above and below argon in the periodic table, and went looking for them by fractional distillation of liquid air or liquid argon. 

In 1898 he reported the discovery of three more elements: neon, krypton and xenon. Ramsay received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1904 for his work on elucidating noble gases.

8 # Recognition :

He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 1902.

Two years later he received the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

9 # Family

He married Margaret Buchanan in 1881 and the couple and a daughter and son.

10 # When did he die?

Sir Ramsay died on July 23, 1916, from nasal cancer at the age of 63.

11 # Comments about him

“To him science owes a priceless debt for investigations which, in the short space of a score of years, made an unparalleled contribution, in that they revealed to the world a whole group of hitherto unknown elements possessing properties both unexpected and unique,” the US chemist Theodore Richards wrote after his death in 1916.