This Day in Science History - July 23 - William Ramsay

July 23rd marks the passing of William Ramsay. Ramsay was a British chemist who discovered four new gases in the atmosphere. He liquefied air and separated each different gas as it cooled to a liquid. He found four gases he could not identify with similar properties to helium. The gases he discovered were neon, argon, krypton and xenon which comprise much of the noble gas period of the periodic table. This discovery would earn him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

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