DISCOVERY 



253 



Lord Rayleigh had been at work for many years on 

 the exact determination of the densities of the principal 

 gases, and he had encountered certain difficulties 

 which he was unable to explain. The density of 

 nitrogen obtained from the air was not the same as 

 that from ammonia. In 1S92 he wrote to Nature, 

 asking for suggestions as to the possible cause of this 

 discrepancy. Two years later it was shown that it 

 must be due to some unknown gas in the atmosphere 

 with a density greater than that of nitrogen. On 

 April 23, 1894, we find Ramsay writing to his wife a 

 letter containing the following passage ' : 



" By the way, curiously, I am at work on nitrogen, 

 but not from a commercial point of view ; or, rather, 

 Williams is. Nitrogen of air is heavier than nitrogen 

 from ammonia in the ratio of 251 to 250. . . . Now, 

 no one has ever taken all the nitrogen out of the air ; 

 or, rather, after all the oxygen has been removed from 

 the air, no one has combined all the nitrogen. It is 

 quite possible that there is some inert gas in nitrogen 

 which has escaped notice. So Williams is at it now 

 combining the nitrogen of the air with magnesium, 

 and seeing if there is anything over — anything not 

 nitrogen. We may discover a new element." 



Less than a year later, on January 31, 1895, Ramsay 

 and Rayleigh read a communication to the Royal 

 Society announcing the discovery of this new gas, 

 which they called Argon, and which was so inactive 

 that they could not make it combine with any other 

 element, do what they would. The next day Ramsay- 

 was reminded of the work of Hillebrand, who had 

 found gases hidden away in the mineral Cleveite which 

 he had beheved to be nitrogen, and which it was now 

 hoped might prove to be a compound of argon with 

 some other element. So Ramsay set to work again 

 to get these gases out of the minerals containing them, 

 with a view to their examination. 



On March 24, another letter to his wife tells of the 

 second discovery ^i 



" Let's take the biggest piece of news first. I 

 bottled the new gas in a vacuum tube, and arranged 

 so that I could see its spectrum and that of argon in 

 the same spectroscope at the same time. There is 

 argon in the gas ; but there was a magnificent yellow 

 I'ne, brilliantly bright, not coincident with but very 

 close to the sodium yellow line. I was puzzled, but 

 began to smell a rat. I told Crookes, and on Saturday 

 morning, when Harley, Shields, and I were looking at 

 the spectrum in the dark-room, a telegram came from 

 Crookes. He had sent a copy here, and I enclose that 



' Note. — The reader is referred to Sir William Tildeu's Life 

 0/ Ramsay, published in 1918 by Macmillan and Co., Ltd., from 

 Which this letter is taken, as well as the two quotations' and '. 



Also to Ramsay's own account of his work on the Rare 

 Gases, in his The Gases of the Atmosphere (Macmillan, 1915. 

 7s. 6d.) 



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