Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay. Argon, a New Constituent of the Atmosphere. The Hodgkins Fund. City of Washington, Smithsonian Institution. 1896. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. 1033. 4to., [4], 43 pp., 5 text figures. Brilliant copy in the original green cloth with blind stamping and gilt stamps. Also: this copy comes with the rare, original, dust jacket. (There are few scientific works published in the 19th century issued with dust jackets.) Condition: book, very fine; dust jacket has some dusting, some tears and chips around edges, but is fresh, and Very Good. $750
First edition, announcing the discovery of the first inert gas, the work (largely) leading to the Nobel Prize in physics for Rayleigh and the Nobel for chemistry for Ramsay in 1904.
And from "The Discovery of Argon: a Case of Learning from Data?", by Aris Spanos in Philosophy of Science ,Vol. 77, No. 3, July 2010:
"In 1904, Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919) and his collaborator Sir William Ramsay (1852–1916) were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, respectively, primarily for their role in the discovery of argon, an inert gas in the atmosphere. The averse reaction to this discovery by Mendeleev (1834–1907) might have been the main reason for his not being awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1906."
"The discovery of argon resulted from a careful unraveling of an empirical discrepancy, initially detected by Rayleigh when measuring the density of nitrogen gas produced by two different procedures. After a long trial‐and‐error process based on a carefully designed sequence of experiments and guided by an informal (by today’s standards) analysis of the resulting data Rayleigh and Ramsay reached the conclusion that the atmospheric air contains argon, a hitherto unknown element."
And this:
"Rayleigh and Ramsey had noted that nitrogen obtained from the air had a density greater than that of nitrogen liberated from its compounds by about one-half percent. This led to the isolation of the first of the inert gases which they called argon. In the following year Ramsay found another, helium, in the mineral clevite, altho this had been noted in the sun’s spectrum by Lockyar in 1868. In four years, 1894-8, five new gases, including neon, krypton and xenon had been discovered. These form a distinct group in the periodic table; all have zero valency.” [Dibner]. Dibner, Heralds of Science 50.
Comments