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William Ramsay
The Gases of the Atmosphere
The History of Their Discovery
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066152673
Table of Contents
PREFACE
The discovery of new elementary gas in the atmosphere in 1894 aroused much interest, and public attention has again been directed to the air, which was, for many centuries, a fruitful field for speculation and conjecture. The account of this discovery, communicated to the Royal Society in January 1895, was, however, necessarily couched in scientific language; and many matters of interest to the chemist and physicist were written in an abbreviated style, in the knowledge that the passages describing them would be easily understood by the experts to whom the communication was primarily addressed. But persons without any special scientific training have frequently expressed to me the hope that an account of the discovery would be published, in which the conclusions drawn from the physical behaviour of argon should be accompanied by a full account of the reasoning on which they are based. An endeavour to fulfil this request is to be found in the following pages. And as the history of the discovery of the better known constituents of the atmosphere is of itself of great interest, and leads up to an acquaintance with the new stranger, who has so long been with us incognito, an effort has here been made to tell the tale of the air in popular language.
LIST OF PORTRAITS
| Stephen Hales | Frontispiece | |
| Robert Boyle | To face page | 8 |
| John Mayow | " | 17 |
| Joseph Black | " | 48 |
| Daniel Rutherford | " | 62 |
| Joseph Priestley | " | 72 |
| Antoine Auguste Lavoisier | " | 102 |
| Hon. Henry Cavendish | " | 121 |
CHAPTER I
THE EXPERIMENTS AND SPECULATIONS OF
BOYLE, MAYOW, AND HALES
To tell the story of the development of men’s ideas regarding the nature of atmospheric air is in great part to write a history of chemistry and physics. This history is an attractive and varied one: in its early stages it was expressed in the quaint terms of ancient mythology, while in its later developments it illustrates the advantage of careful experimental inquiry. The human mind is apt to reason from insufficient premisses; and we meet with many instances of incorrect conclusions, based upon experiment, it is true, but upon experiment inadequate to support their burden. Further research has often proved the reasoning of the Schoolmen to be futile; not indeed from want of logical method, but because important premisses had been overlooked.
Among the errors which misled the older speculators, three stand out conspicuously. These are—
First, The confusion of one gas with another. Since gases are for the most part colourless, and always transparent, they make less impression on the senses than liquids or solids do. It was difficult to believe in the substantiality of bodies which could not be seen, but the existence of which had to be inferred from the testimony of other senses; indeed, in certain instances only by the sense of touch, for many gases possess neither smell nor taste. This peculiarity led, in past ages, to the notion that air possessed a semi-spiritual nature; that its substantiality was less than that of other objects more accessible to our senses. We meet with a relic of this view in words still in common use. Thus the Greek words πνέω, I blow, and πνεῦμα, a spirit or ghost, are closely connected; in Latin we have spiro, I breathe, and spiritus, the human spirit; in English, the words ghost and gust are cognate. And the same connection can be traced in similar words in many other languages.
Our sense of smell is affected by extremely minute traces of gases and vapours—traces so small as to be unrecognisable by any other method of perception, direct or indirect. A piece of musk retains its fragrant odour for years, and the most delicate balance fails to detect any appreciable loss of weight in it. We are capable of smelling gases only: liquids and solids, if introduced into the nostrils, irritate the olfactory nerves, but do not stimulate them so as to incite the sense of smell; yet the admixture of a minute trace of some odorous vapour with air appears entirely to change its properties. The effect of inhaling such air, although sometimes pleasant, is very different from the sensation produced by pure inodorous air, and such admixtures were in olden times naturally taken to be air modified in its properties. But such modifications are obviously almost infinite in number, for varieties of scent are excessively numerous; and it was therefore perhaps deemed useless to attempt to investigate such a substance as air, whose properties could change in so inexplicable and mysterious a manner. Owing, therefore, to its elusive and, as it were, semi-spiritual properties, and to its unexpected changes of character, it was long before its true nature was discovered. It had not escaped observation that “air” obtained by distilling animal and vegetable matter, or by the action of acids on iron and zinc, differed from ordinary air by being inflammable; but such “airs” were regarded as atmospheric air, modified