Ramsay, Sir William 1852-1916
Scottish chemist and Nobel Prize winner

He was born in Glasgow and studied classics at Glasgow University and chemistry at T�bingen. He then became an assistant at Anderson's College, Glasgow and Professor of Chemistry at University College, Bristol (1880-87). He subsequently became professor at University College London (1887-1913). At Glasgow he studied the alkaloids and at Bristol he worked on the vapour pressure of liquids. In 1894, in conjunction with Lord John Kayleigh, he discovered argon. In 1895 he isolated a light inert gas resembling argon by boiling a mineral called cleivite. Spectroscopic analysis showed that this gas was helium, which Sir Norman Lockyer and Edward Frankland had discovered in the spectrum of the Sun nearly 30 years earlier. Working with Morris William Travers, Ramsay found the green and yellow lines of krypton, the crimson of neon and the blue lines of xenon in 1898. Further research confirmed the inert nature of these gases and their atomic weights. In 1908 Ramsay obtained radon - discovered by Frederich Ernst Dorn in 1900 - in sufficient quantities to show that it belonged to the same family as helium and the other inert gases. He was elected FRS in 1888, knighted in 1904 and awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in the same year.

Bibliography: William Augustus Tilden, Sir William Ramsay (1918)