Ramsay history

Yet Muir s friend Sir William Ramsay—a far more accomplished scientist than Muir, and one of the most proficient laboratory researchers of his era—was much more engaged by the possibility that alchemy might offer insight into the goals and consequences of modem science. As we have seen, Ramsay was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and he was deeply steeped in alchemical and Hermetic texts. His own chemistry pedagogy made room for alchemical history in his university classrooms in a way that had not been the case in the classes he had taken as a young man. 

I also wish to thank the Bodleian Library at Oxford University for permission to do research in the Frederick Soddy Papers in their Modem Manuscripts collections, and the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University, for permission to work with Soddy s lecture notes and papers in their archives. I thank University College London, Special Collections, for permission to do research in the Sir William Ramsay Papers. I also thank the special collections librarians at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for access to H. G. Wells s papers, and the University of Texas at Austin Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center for access to Edith Sitwell s papers. Frances Soar of the Geographical Association, the administrators of the Frederick Soddy Tmst, and Maxwell Wright and Gwen Huntley of Bunkers Solicitors generously helped me in my efforts to track down an estate for Frederick Soddy s unpublished writings. And I wish to thank Mark Smithells and the Smithells family in New Zealand for permission to quote from Arthur Smithells s unpublished manuscript in the Frederick Soddy Papers. 

Ramsay, W., The Gases of the Atmosphere. The History of Their Discovery, ... 

O. B. Ramsay, The early history and development of conformational analysis in Essays on the History of Organic Chemistry, ed. J. G. Traynham, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA, 1987, 54-77. 

A comprehensive account of the origins and early history of stereochemistry is given in O. B. Ramsay, Stereochemistry. Heyden, London, 1981. 

The fable of the shipwreck and the goat, somewhat alfied to that of "Hai Ibn Yoqdan, the Self-Taught Philosopher" whose history was popular at this period, seems to have been intended to introduce the moral of the story Cyrus understood, says Ramsay, that the mythologies of the Egyptians and the Persians were founded on the same principles, for "they were merely different names for expressing the same ideas." One also notes the bucolic... 

J.R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, MacMillan and Co. Ltd., London, Vol. 4, 1964, pp. 891-899. Partington notes here that the Russian chemist spelled his name MendeleeiF when he signed the register of the Royal Society and Ramsay recommended Mendeleeif. We will employ the more commonly used transliteration Mendeleev . 

On the history of stereochemistry, see especially Ramsay, Stereochemistry (1981), and Ram-berg, Stereochemistry (2003). 

William Ramsay The gases of the atmosphere. The history of their discovery. London, Macmillian and Co., 240 pp. 

History has a striking power of prediction. Argon had not been properly discovered yet, when on May 24, 1894, Ramsay wrote a letter to Rayleigh in which he asked whether it had ever occurred to him that there was indeed a place in the periodic table for gaseous elements. For instance ... 

Such exclusive situation soon became a rule. Therefore, we shall have to discuss briefly some important events in the history of radioactivity studies. Now we must finish the story of radon. This name remained because radon is the longest-lived element among the radioactive inert gases. Ramsay suggested to name it niton (from the Latin for glowing) but this name did not take root. 

History. Helium was discovered by spectroscopic studies conducted by Jansen on the solar protuberance observed during the solar eclipse of 1868 and it was named by Frankland and Lockwood from the Greek, helios, for Sun. Later, helium was identified by Kayser in the Earth s atmosphere and by Sir William Ramsay by dissolving the uranium mineral cleveite today known as uraninite [UO, tetragonal or metamict] into acids. 

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