Ramsay, William (1852–1916)

Scottish chemist who, with Lord Rayleigh, discovered argon in 1894. In 1895 Ramsay produced helium and in 1898, in cooperation with Morris Travers, identified neon, krypton, and xenon. In 1903, with Frederick Soddy, he noted the transmutation of radium into helium, which led to the discovery of the density and relative atomic mass of radium. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1904 for his discovery of noble gases (rare gases) in air and their locations in the periodic table. He was made a KCB in 1902.

In his book The Gases of the Atmosphere (1896), Ramsay repeated a suspicion he had stated in 1892 that there was an eighth group of new elements at the end of the periodic table. During the next decade Ramsay and Travers sought the remaining noble gases by the fractional distillation of liquid air.

Ramsay was born in Glasgow and studied there and in Germany at Tübingen. In 1880 he was appointed professor at the newly created University College of Bristol (later Bristol University) and a year later became principal of the College. From 1887 he was professor at University College, London.

Helium was known from spectrographic evidence to be present on the Sun but yet to be found on Earth. Certain uranium minerals were known to produce an unidentified noble gas on heating, and Ramsay obtained sufficient of the gas to send a sample to English scientist William Crookes for spectrographic analysis. Crookes confirmed that it was helium.