Rutherford discovered nitrogen by the isolation of the particle in 1772. When Joseph Black was studying the properties of carbon dioxide, he found that a candle would not burn in it. Black turned this problem over to his student at the time, Rutherford. Rutherford kept a mouse in a space with a confined quantity of air until it died. Then, he burned a candle in the remaining air until it went out. Afterwards, he burned phosphorus in that, until it would not burn. Then the air was passed through a carbon dioxide absorbing solution. The remaining component of the air did not support combustion, and a mouse could not live in it.
Isolation of nitrogen
Daniel Rutherford
Daniel Rutherford | Isolation of nitrogen
By the isolation of the particle. He discovered nitrogen by the isolation of the particle in 1772. When Joseph Black was studying the properties of carbon dioxide, he found that a candle would not burn in it. By the isolation of the particle. He discovered nitrogen by the isolation of the particle, when  Joseph Black was studying the properties of carbon dioxide, he found that a candle would not burn in it. Black turned this problem over to his student at the time
the general surface wind circulation associated with the high-pressure center (h) is most likely
user
A high-pressure area, high ,or anticyclone.
assistant
how is it formed?
user
Winds within high-pressure areas flow outward from the higher pressure areas near their centers towards the lower pressure areas further from their centers. Gravity adds to the forces. The winds are further twisted due to Coriolis effect.
assistant
could i know more about the effect mentioned above?
user
This is an apparent, but fictitious, force that arises when an observer is in a rotating reference frame, due to the conservation of angular momentum of the air as it moves towards or away from the Earth's axis of rotation.
assistant
how is it related to the wind conditions?
user
They are associated with light winds at the surface and subsidence through the lower portion of the troposphere.
assistant
what is the last term used above?
user
It is the lowest layer of earth's atmosphere.
assistant
what does it consist of?
user
Nitrogrn, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and small amounts of other gases.
assistant
who discovered the former from the list above?
user
Daniel Rutherford.
assistant
what are its properties?
user
It has seven electrons and one of the highest electronegativities among the elements.
assistant
what are its uses?
user
Synthetically produced nitrogenous compounds like ammonia and nitrates are key industrial fertilisers, and fertiliser nitrates are key pollutants in the eutrophication of water systems.
assistant
regarding, the water systems process mentioned by you, is it a natural process?
user
It is mostly caused by phosphate and nitrogen from various human sources.
assistant
where is the scientist mentioned above from?
user
Scotland.
assistant
how did he discover the gas?
user
Rutherford discovered nitrogen by the isolation of the particle in 1772. When Joseph Black was studying the properties of carbon dioxide, he found that a candle would not burn in it. Black turned this problem over to his student at the time, Rutherford. Rutherford kept a mouse in a space with a confined quantity of air until it died. Then, he burned a candle in the remaining air until it went out. Afterwards, he burned phosphorus in that, until it would not burn. Then the air was passed through a carbon dioxide absorbing solution. The remaining component of the air did not support combustion, and a mouse could not live in it.
Daniel Rutherford | Isolation of nitrogen
Rutherford called the gas (which we now know would have consisted primarily of nitrogen) "noxious air" or "phlogisticated air". Rutherford reported the experiment in 1772. He and Black were convinced of the validity of the phlogiston theory, so they explained their results in terms of it.
Daniel Rutherford | Isolation of nitrogen
Daniel Rutherford (3 November 1749 – 15 December 1819) was a Scottish physician, chemist and botanist who is known for the isolation of nitrogen in 1772.
Daniel Rutherford | Introduction
No chemical analysis was possible at the time, but helium was later found to be a noble gas. Before them, in 1784, the English chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish had discovered that air contains a small proportion of a substance less reactive than nitrogen. A century later, in 1895, Lord Rayleigh discovered that samples of nitrogen from the air were of a different density than nitrogen resulting from chemical reactions. Along with Scottish scientist William Ramsay at University College, London, Lord Rayleigh theorized that the nitrogen extracted from air was mixed with another gas, leading to an experiment that successfully isolated a new element, argon, from the Greek word (, "idle" or "lazy").
Noble gas | History
After experimentation Rutherford traced the reaction to the nitrogen in air and found that when alpha particles were introduced into pure nitrogen gas, the effect was larger. In 1919 Rutherford assumed that the alpha particle knocked a proton out of nitrogen, turning it into carbon. After observing Blackett's cloud chamber images in 1925, Rutherford realized that the opposite was the case: after capture of the alpha particle, a proton is ejected, so that heavy oxygen, not carbon, is the end result i.e. Z is not decremented but incremented. This was the first reported nuclear reaction, N + α → O + p.
Proton | History
During an analysis of the uranium containing mineral uranite he discovered that a gas evolved. He identified this gas by spectroscopic methods to be nitrogen. Several years later in 1895 William Ramsay did similar experiments with uranium containing minerals and discovered by similar methods that the gas was a mixture of argon and helium which until then had only been detected in the corona of stars. A reexamination by Ramsay of Hillebrand's samples showed that the gas from uranite contained a large amount of nitrogen.
William Francis Hillebrand | Studies of uranium
The nitrogen compound sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) has been known since the time of the Ancient Egyptians. In the 1760s two scientists, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley, isolated nitrogen from air, but neither realized the presence of an undiscovered element. It was not until several years later, in 1772, that Daniel Rutherford realized that the gas was indeed nitrogen. The alchemist Hennig Brandt first discovered phosphorus in Hamburg in 1669. Brandt produced the element by heating evaporated urine and condensing the resulting phosphorus vapor in water. Brandt initially thought that he had discovered the Philosopher's Stone, but eventually realized that this was not the case.
Pnictogen | History
These samples were identified as helium by Lockyer and British physicist William Crookes. It was independently isolated from cleveite, in the same year, by chemists, Per Teodor Cleve and Abraham Langlet, in Uppsala, Sweden, who collected enough of the gas to accurately determine its atomic weight. Helium was also isolated by the American geochemist, William Francis Hillebrand, prior to Ramsay's discovery, when he noticed unusual spectral lines while testing a sample of the mineral uraninite. Hillebrand, however, attributed the lines to nitrogen. His letter of congratulations to Ramsay offers an interesting case of discovery, and near-discovery, in science.
Helium | Scientific discoveries
The most celebrated discoveries of Scottish chemist William Ramsay were made in inorganic chemistry. Ramsay was intrigued by the British physicist John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh's 1892 discovery that the atomic weight of nitrogen found in chemical compounds was lower than that of nitrogen found in the atmosphere. He ascribed this discrepancy to a light gas included in chemical compounds of nitrogen, while Ramsay suspected a hitherto undiscovered heavy gas in atmospheric nitrogen. Using two different methods to remove all known gases from air, Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh were able to announce in 1894 that they had found a monatomic, chemically inert gaseous element that constituted nearly 1 percent of the atmosphere; they named it argon.
History of chemistry | Ramsay's discovery of the noble gases
Hydrogen: Cavendish, in 1766, was the first to distinguish hydrogen from other gases, although Paracelsus around 1500, Robert Boyle (1670), and Joseph Priestley (?) had observed its production by reacting strong acids with metals. Lavoisier named it in 1793. Oxygen: Carl Wilhelm Scheele obtained oxygen by heating mercuric oxide and nitrates in 1771, but did not publish his findings until 1777. Priestley also prepared this new "air" by 1774, but only Lavoisier recognized it as a true element; he named it in 1777. Nitrogen: Rutherford discovered nitrogen while he was studying at the University of Edinburgh. He showed that the air in which animals breathed, after removal of exhaled carbon dioxide, was no longer able to burn a candle.
Nonmetal | 18th century: H, O, N, (Te), Cl
By dissolving the radioactive ore cleveite in acid, William Ramsay was able to collect a gas trapped within the rock, which had an atomic weight of 4, and the same spectral lines which Lockyer had observed: helium. Prior to this, Ramsay had already isolated a new gas from the atmosphere; argon, with an atomic weight of 40. A problem now arose – Mendeleev had not left any gaps which were suitable for either of these two new elements, which led Ramsay to conclude an entire group was missing from the periodic table – only two of whose members were now known to exist, helium and argon.
Chemistry: A Volatile History | William Ramsay discovers the noble gases
With this discovery, they realized an entire class of gases was missing from the periodic table. During his search for argon, Ramsay also managed to isolate helium for the first time while heating cleveite, a mineral. In 1902, having accepted the evidence for the elements helium and argon, Dmitri Mendeleev included these noble gases as group 0 in his arrangement of the elements, which would later become the periodic table. Ramsay continued his search for these gases using the method of fractional distillation to separate liquid air into several components. In 1898, he discovered the elements krypton, neon, and xenon, and named them after the Greek words (, "hidden"), (, "new"), and (, "stranger"), respectively.
Noble gas | History
Sir William Ramsay (; 2 October 1852 – 23 July 1916) was a Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 "in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air" along with his collaborator, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics that same year for their discovery of argon. After the two men identified argon, Ramsay investigated other atmospheric gases. His work in isolating argon, helium, neon, krypton and xenon led to the development of a new section of the periodic table.
William Ramsay | Introduction
Argon: Lord Rayleigh and Ramsay discovered argon in 1894 by comparing the molecular weights of nitrogen prepared by liquefaction from air, and nitrogen prepared by chemical means. It was the first noble gas to be isolated. Krypton, neon, and xenon: In 1898, within a period of three weeks, Ramsay and Travers successively separated krypton, neon and xenon from liquid argon by exploiting differences in their boiling points.
Nonmetal | Late 19th century: He, F, (Ge), Ar, Kr, Ne, Xe
As a result, he discovered the emission of a subatomic particle which, in 1919, he called the "hydrogen atom" but, in 1920, he more accurately named the proton.
Ernest Rutherford | Introduction
In 1787, the French physicist and balloon pioneer, Jacques Charles, found that oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and air expand to the same extent over the same 80 kelvin interval. He noted that, for an ideal gas at constant pressure, the volume is directly proportional to its temperature:
Gas | Charles's law
Nitrogen is the chemical element with the symbol N and atomic number 7. It was first discovered and isolated by Scottish physician Daniel Rutherford in 1772. Although Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Henry Cavendish had independently done so at about the same time, Rutherford is generally accorded the credit because his work was published first. The name "nitrogène" was suggested by French chemist Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal in 1790 when it was found that nitrogen was present in nitric acid and nitrates. Antoine Lavoisier suggested instead the name "azote", from the Greek ἀζωτικός "no life", as it is an asphyxiant gas; this name is instead used in many languages, such as French, Italian, Russian, Romanian and Turkish, and appears in the English names of some nitrogen compounds such as hydrazine, azides and azo compounds.
Nitrogen | Introduction
In August Ramsay told Rayleigh he had isolated a new, heavy component of air, which did not appear to have any chemical reactivity. He named this inert gas "argon", from the Greek word meaning "lazy". In the following years, working with Morris Travers, he discovered neon, krypton, and xenon. He also isolated helium, which had only been observed in the spectrum of the sun, and had not previously been found on earth. In 1910 he isolated and characterised radon. During 1893–blue Ramsay collaborated with Emily Aston, a British chemist, in experiments on mineral analysis and atomic weight determination. Their work included publications on the molecular surface energies of mixtures of non-associating liquids.
William Ramsay | Career
He performed experiments to determine gas pressures during hydrogen explosions using a special chamber fitted with a piston, and was able to distinguish burning of mixtures of hydrogen and oxygen from true explosions.
Marcellin Berthelot | Publications
The gas was first synthesized in 1772 by the natural philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley, who called it "phlogisticated nitrous air" (see phlogiston). Priestley described his discovery in the book "Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1775)", in which he described how to produce the preparation of "nitrous air diminished", by heating iron filings dampened with nitric acid. James Watt built a portable gas chamber to facilitate Davy's experiments with the inhalation of nitrous oxide. At one point the gas was combined with wine to judge its efficacy as a cure for hangover (his laboratory notebook indicated success).
Humphry Davy | Pneumatic Institution
In 1917 Rutherford bombarded nitrogen gas with alpha particles and observed hydrogen nuclei being emitted from the gas (Rutherford recognized these, because he had previously obtained them bombarding hydrogen with alpha particles, and observing hydrogen nuclei in the products). Rutherford concluded that the hydrogen nuclei emerged from the nuclei of the nitrogen atoms themselves (in effect, he had split a nitrogen). From his own work and the work of his students Bohr and Henry Moseley, Rutherford knew that the positive charge of any atom could always be equated to that of an integer number of hydrogen nuclei. This, coupled with the atomic mass of many elements being roughly equivalent to an integer number of hydrogen atoms - then assumed to be the lightest particles - led him to conclude that hydrogen nuclei were singular particles and a basic constituent of all atomic nuclei.
Atomic theory | Discovery of nuclear particles
The following year, Ramsay liberated another inert gas from a mineral called cleveite; this proved to be helium, previously known only in the solar spectrum. In his book "The Gases of the Atmosphere" (1896), Ramsay showed that the positions of helium and argon in the periodic table of elements indicated that at least three more noble gases might exist. In 1898 Ramsay and the British chemist Morris W. Travers isolated these elements—called neon, krypton, and xenon—from air brought to a liquid state at low temperature and high pressure. Sir William Ramsay worked with Frederick Soddy to demonstrate, in 1903, that alpha particles (helium nuclei) were continually produced during the radioactive decay of a sample of radium.
History of chemistry | Ramsay's discovery of the noble gases
In 1887 he succeeded Alexander Williamson as the chair of Chemistry at University College London (UCL). It was here at UCL that red post celebrated discoveries were made. As early as 1885–1890 he published several notable papers on the oxides of nitrogen, developing the skills that he needed for his subsequent work. On the evening of 19 April 1894 Ramsay attended a lecture given by Lord Rayleigh. Rayleigh had noticed a discrepancy between the density of nitrogen made by chemical synthesis and nitrogen isolated from the air by removal of the other known components. After a short conversation he and Ramsay decided to investigate this.
William Ramsay | Career
On 13 August 1894, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh and William Ramsay announced the detection of a new gas in the atmosphere. On 31 January 1895 they made a full report to the Royal Society on the new gas, argon. In addition, William Crookes, who had been asked to examine a sample, presented on the spectra of argon, reported that argon displayed two distinct spectra. In this way, Crookes identified the first known sample of terrestrial helium and established its correspondence to observations of solar helium. The discovery of argon and of helium led to identification of the noble gases and the reorganization of the periodic system.
William Crookes | Later years
In 1919–1920, Rutherford found that nitrogen and other light elements ejected a proton, which he called a "hydrogen atom", when hit with α (alpha) particles. This result showed Rutherford that hydrogen nuclei were a part of nitrogen nuclei (and by inference, probably other nuclei as well). Such a construction had been suspected for many years on the basis of atomic weights which were whole numbers of that of hydrogen; see Prout's hypothesis. Hydrogen was known to be the lightest element, and its nuclei presumably the lightest nuclei. Now, because of all these considerations, Rutherford decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a fundamental building block of all nuclei, and also possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since nothing was known from the nucleus that was lighter.
Ernest Rutherford | Gold foil experiment
Ramsay was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of "services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system." In 1897, J. J. Thomson discovered the electron using the cathode ray tube. In 1898, Wilhelm Wien demonstrated that canal rays (streams of positive ions) can be deflected by magnetic fields, and that the amount of deflection is proportional to the mass-to-charge ratio. This discovery would lead to the analytical technique known as mass spectrometry in 1912.
History of chemistry | Ramsay's discovery of the noble gases
After an oil drilling operation in 1903 in Dexter, Kansas produced a gas geyser that would not burn, Kansas state geologist Erasmus Haworth collected samples of the escaping gas and took them back to the University of Kansas at Lawrence where, with the help of chemists Hamilton Cady and David McFarland, he discovered that the gas consisted of, by volume, 72% nitrogen, 15% methane (a combustible percentage only with sufficient oxygen), 1% hydrogen, and 12% an unidentifiable gas. With further analysis, Cady and McFarland discovered that 1.84% of the gas sample was helium. This showed that despite its overall rarity on Earth, helium was concentrated in large quantities under the American Great Plains, available for extraction as a byproduct of natural gas.
Helium | Extraction and use
Its existence was first suggested in 1905 by the British physiologist John Sydney Edkins, and gastrins were isolated in 1964 by Hilda Tracy and Roderic Alfred Gregory at the University of Liverpool. In 1964 the structure of gastrin was determined.
Gastrin | History
After leaving the experiment running for a long period of time, a spectral analysis of the contents of the former evacuated space revealed the presence of helium. Later in 1907, Rutherford and Thomas Royds showed that the helium was first formed as positively charged nuclei of helium (He) which were identical to alpha particles, which could pass through the thin glass wall but were contained within the surrounding glass envelope. From 1904 to 1914, Soddy was a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Ruth Pirret worked as his research assistant during this time. In May 1910 Soddy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Frederick Soddy | Scientific career
Sir William Ramsay (1852–1916) was a Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases. William Ramsay may also refer to:
William Ramsay (disambiguation) | Introduction
He found that a sample of this radioactive material of any size invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay – its "half-life" (11½ minutes in this case). From 1900 to 1903, he was joined at McGill by the young chemist Frederick Soddy (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1921) for whom he set the problem of identifying the thorium emanations. Once he had eliminated all the normal chemical reactions, Soddy suggested that it must be one of the inert gases, which they named thoron (later found to be an isotope of radon). They also found another type of thorium they called Thorium X, and kept on finding traces of helium.
Ernest Rutherford | Scientific research
He then went to University College, where he began to work with Sir William Ramsay. Travers helped Ramsay to determine the properties of the newly discovered gases argon and helium. They also heated minerals and meteorites in the search for further gases, but found none. Then in 1898 they obtained a large quantity of liquid air and subjected it to fractional distillation. Spectral analysis of the least volatile fraction revealed the presence of krypton. They examined the argon fraction for a constituent of lower boiling point, and discovered neon. Finally xenon, occurring as an even less volatile companion to krypton, was identified spectroscopically.
Morris Travers | Career
British chemist Henry Cavendish, the discoverer of hydrogen in 1766, discovered that air is composed of more gases than nitrogen and oxygen. He recorded these findings in 1784 and 1785; among them, he found a then-unidentified gas less reactive than nitrogen. Helium was first reported in 1868; the report was based on the new technique of spectroscopy and some spectral lines emitted by the Sun did not match those of any of the known elements. Mendeleev was not convinced by this finding since variance of temperate led to change of intensity of spectral lines and their location on the spectrum; this opinion was held by some other scientists of the day.
History of the periodic table | Inert gases
Later, however, it was found that gas discovered by Gosio and Biginelli was in fact trimethylarsine.
Pietro Biginelli | Scientific interests
Thus, confirming and extending the work of Wilhelm Wien who in 1898 discovered the proton in streams of ionized gas, Rutherford postulated the hydrogen nucleus to be a new particle in 1920, which he dubbed the "proton". In 1921, while working with Niels Bohr (who postulated that electrons moved in specific orbits), Rutherford theorized about the existence of neutrons, (which he had christened in his 1920 Bakerian Lecture), which could somehow compensate for the repelling effect of the positive charges of protons by causing an attractive nuclear force and thus keep the nuclei from flying apart from the repulsion between protons.
Ernest Rutherford | Gold foil experiment
The next year, Ramsay tested a report of American chemist William Francis Hillebrand, who found a steam of an unreactive gas from a sample of uraninite. Wishing to prove it was nitrogen, Ramsay analyzed a different uranium mineral, cleveite, and found a new element, which he named krypton. This finding was corrected by British chemist William Crookes, who matched its spectrum to that of the Sun's helium. Following this discovery, Ramsay, using fractional distillation to separate air, discovered several more such gases in 1898: metargon, krypton, neon, and xenon; detailed spectroscopic analysis of the first of these demonstrated it was argon contaminated by a carbon-based impurity.
History of the periodic table | Inert gases
In an experiment where they shot alpha particles through nitrogen, he discovered that the alpha particles knocked hydrogen nuclei (i.e. protons) out of the nitrogen nuclei.
Geiger–Marsden experiment | Rutherford determines the nucleus is positively charged
Photographs of Robert John Strutt when he was young can be found in this book. Both the father and son's work on light scattering was discussed by Young in 1982. A sketch of Robert John Strutt when he was old can also be found in Young (1982). (Please see reference.) In 1910 Robert Strutt discovered that an electrical discharge in nitrogen gas produced "active nitrogen", an allotrope considered to be monatomic. The "whirling cloud of brilliant yellow light" produced by his apparatus reacted with quicksilver to produce explosive mercury nitride.
Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh | Career
Neon was discovered in 1898 by the British chemists Sir William Ramsay (1852–1916) and Morris W. Travers (1872–1961) in London. Neon was discovered when Ramsay chilled a sample of air until it became a liquid, then warmed the liquid and captured the gases as they boiled off. The gases nitrogen, oxygen, and argon had been identified, but the remaining gases were isolated in roughly their order of abundance, in a six-week period beginning at the end of May 1898. First to be identified was krypton. The next, after krypton had been removed, was a gas which gave a brilliant red light under spectroscopic discharge.
Neon | History
After graduating from Magdalene College in 1921, Blackett spent ten years working at the Cavendish Laboratory as an experimental physicist with Ernest Rutherford and in 1923 became a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, a position he held until 1933. Rutherford had found out that the nucleus of the nitrogen atom could be disintegrated by firing fast alpha particles into nitrogen. He asked Blackett to use a cloud chamber to find visible tracks of this disintegration, and by 1925, he had taken 23,000 photographs showing 415,000 tracks of ionized particles. Eight of these were forked, and this showed that the nitrogen atom-alpha particle combination had formed an atom of fluorine, which then disintegrated into an isotope of oxygen and a proton.
Patrick Blackett | Career and research
For example, Robert Boyle studied pneumatic chemistry for a small portion of his career. One of his experiments related the macroscopic properties of pressure and volume of a gas. His experiment used a J-tube manometer which looks like a test tube in the shape of the letter J. Boyle trapped an inert gas in the closed end of the test tube with a column of mercury, thereby making the number of particles and the temperature constant. He observed that when the pressure was increased in the gas, by adding more mercury to the column, the trapped gas' volume decreased (this is known as an inverse relationship).
Gas | Macroscopic
In 1906 he took a First Class B Sc Honours degree in Physics, and stayed at Manchester doing research in spectroscopy, especially on the constitution of the electric spark. From 1907 to 1909 he worked with Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics) on the spectrum of radon and, more importantly, on the identification of the alpha particle as the nucleus of the helium atom, in what is called "The Beautiful Experiment." Rutherford and Royds published four joint papers.
Thomas Royds | Early years
Smyth's early research was in spectroscopy, focusing on ionization of gases by impact with electrons as a means to study the gases' critical energy levels. He published his first research article, on the radiating potentials of nitrogen gas, in 1919; this became the basis of his first dissertation. In a 1922 article, he described a method for determining the ionization energy of a molecule using anode rays and demonstrated the method on mercury vapor. In the following year he used this same method to study nitrogen. He also published on the ionization of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, nitrogen dioxide, water vapor, sulfur dioxide, and carbon disulfide.
Henry DeWolf Smyth | Early career
Radon was first identified in 1898 by Friedrich Ernst Dorn, and was named "radium emanation", but was not considered a noble gas until 1904 when its characteristics were found to be similar to those of other noble gases. Rayleigh and Ramsay received the 1904 Nobel Prizes in Physics and in Chemistry, respectively, for their discovery of the noble gases; in the words of J. E. Cederblom, then president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, "the discovery of an entirely new group of elements, of which no single representative had been known with any certainty, is something utterly unique in the history of chemistry, being intrinsically an advance in science of peculiar significance".
Noble gas | History
The results of Russell's work on gases were communicated to the Chemical Society, and in Henry Watts's "Dictionary of Chemistry" he wrote the article on "Gas Analysis" (1868). He made an extended study of the formation of London's fog. Other investigations were the determination of the atomic weights of cobalt and nickel; memoirs on absorption spectra; and papers on the action of wood and other substances on a photographic plate in darkness.
William James Russell | Works
Ramsey successfully discovered all the other stable elements in the group which he named neon (Greek for new), krypton (Greek for hidden) and xenon (Greek for stranger). All the elements of this new group had one overwhelming characteristic; their lack of reactivity. It was this particular characteristic that brought to mind a name for the new group: the noble gases.
Chemistry: A Volatile History | William Ramsay discovers the noble gases
Hamilton Perkins Cady (May 2, 1874 – May 26, 1943) was an American chemist who in 1907 in collaboration with David McFarland discovered that helium could be extracted from natural gas.
Hamilton Cady | Introduction
When Lawrence postulated the existence of a new and hitherto unknown particle that he claimed was a possible source of limitless energy at the Solvay Conference in 1933, Chadwick responded that the results were more likely attributable to contamination of the equipment. While Lawrence rechecked his results at Berkeley only to find that Chadwick was correct, Rutherford and Oliphant conducted an investigation at the Cavendish that found that deuterium fuses to form helium-3, thereby causing the effect that the Lawrence had observed. This was another major discovery, but the Oliphant-Rutherford particle accelerator was an expensive state-of-the-art piece of equipment. In March 1935, Chadwick received an offer of the Lyon Jones Chair of physics at the University of Liverpool, in his wife's home town, to succeed Lionel Wilberforce.
James Chadwick | Liverpool
The gas was first synthesised in 1772 by English natural philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley who called it "phlogisticated nitrous air" (see phlogiston theory) or "inflammable nitrous air". Priestley published his discovery in the book "Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1775)", where he described how to produce the preparation of "nitrous air diminished", by heating iron filings dampened with nitric acid.
Nitrous oxide | History
Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei. Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering by the gold foil experiment of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. He performed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction in 1917 in experiments where nitrogen nuclei were bombarded with alpha particles.
Ernest Rutherford | Introduction
Cavendish found that a definite, peculiar, and highly inflammable gas, which he referred to as "Inflammable Air", was produced by the action of certain acids on certain metals. This gas was hydrogen, which Cavendish correctly guessed was proportioned two to one in water. Although others, such as Robert Boyle, had prepared hydrogen gas earlier, Cavendish is usually given the credit for recognising its elemental nature. In 1777, Cavendish discovered that air exhaled by mammals is converted to "fixed air" (carbon dioxide), not "phlogisticated air" as predicted by Joseph Priestley. Also, by dissolving alkalis in acids, Cavendish produced carbon dioxide, which he collected, along with other gases, in bottles inverted over water or mercury.
Henry Cavendish | Chemistry research
In 1823, Michael Faraday, then an assistant in Davy's lab, successfully liquefied chlorine and went on to liquefy all known gaseous elements, except for nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. Shortly after, in 1869, Irish chemist Thomas Andrews studied the phase transition from a liquid to a gas and coined the term critical point to describe the condition where a gas and a liquid were indistinguishable as phases, and Dutch physicist Johannes van der Waals supplied the theoretical framework which allowed the prediction of critical behavior based on measurements at much higher temperatures. By 1908, James Dewar and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes were successfully able to liquefy hydrogen and then newly discovered helium, respectively.
Condensed matter physics | Classical physics
With the discovery of the neutron, scientists could at last calculate what fraction of binding energy each nucleus had, by comparing the nuclear mass with that of the protons and neutrons which composed it. Differences between nuclear masses were calculated in this way. When nuclear reactions were measured, these were found to agree with Einstein's calculation of the equivalence of mass and energy to within 1% as of 1934.
Nuclear physics | James Chadwick discovers the neutron
References to the word "neutron" in connection with the atom can be found in the literature as early as 1899, however.
Discovery of the neutron | Rutherford atom
This specimen was also the first substance found to be repelled by the poles of a magnet. Faraday invented an early form of what was to become the Bunsen burner, which is in practical use in science laboratories around the world as a convenient source of heat. Faraday worked extensively in the field of chemistry, discovering chemical substances such as benzene (which he called bicarburet of hydrogen) and liquefying gases such as chlorine. The liquefying of gases helped to establish that gases are the vapours of liquids possessing a very low boiling point and gave a more solid basis to the concept of molecular aggregation.
Michael Faraday | Chemistry
Early work on the study of the chemistry of rutherfordium focused on gas thermochromatography and measurement of relative deposition temperature adsorption curves. The initial work was carried out at Dubna in an attempt to reaffirm their discovery of the element. Recent work is more reliable regarding the identification of the parent rutherfordium radioisotopes. The isotope Rf has been used for these studies, though the long-lived isotope Rf (produced in the decay chain of Lv, Fl, and Cn) may be advantageous for future experiments. The experiments relied on the expectation that rutherfordium would begin the new 6d series of elements and should therefore form a volatile tetrachloride due to the tetrahedral nature of the molecule.
Rutherfordium | Gas phase
Robert John Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh FRS (28 August 1875 – 13 December 1947) was a British peer and physicist. He discovered "active nitrogen" and was the first to distinguish the glow of the night sky.
Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh | Introduction
In 1898, Friedrich Ernst Dorn discovered a radioactive gas resulting from the radioactive decay of radium; Ramsay and Robert Whytlaw-Gray subsequently isolated radon in 1910. Astatine was synthesised in 1940 by Dale R. Corson, Kenneth Ross MacKenzie, and Emilio Segrè. They bombarded bismuth-209 with alpha particles in a cyclotron to produce, after emission of two neutrons, astatine-211.
Nonmetal | 20th century: Rn, (At)
The word "proton" is Greek for "first", and this name was given to the hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920. In previous years, Rutherford had discovered that the hydrogen nucleus (known to be the lightest nucleus) could be extracted from the nuclei of nitrogen by atomic collisions. Protons were therefore a candidate to be a fundamental particle, and hence a building block of nitrogen and all other heavier atomic nuclei.
Proton | Introduction
In 1671, Robert Boyle discovered and described the reaction between iron filings and dilute acids, which results in the production of hydrogen gas. In 1766, Henry Cavendish was the first to recognize hydrogen gas as a discrete substance, by naming the gas from a metal-acid reaction "inflammable air". He speculated that "inflammable air" was in fact identical to the hypothetical substance called "phlogiston" and further finding in 1781 that the gas produces water when burned. He is usually given credit for the discovery of hydrogen as an element. In 1783, Antoine Lavoisier gave the element the name hydrogen (from the Greek ὑδρο- "hydro" meaning "water" and -γενής "genes" meaning "creator") when he and Laplace reproduced Cavendish's finding that water is produced when hydrogen is burned.
Hydrogen | Discovery and use
In 1903 he was called on to analyze a natural gas from Dexter, Kansas, which would not burn unless continuously heated. In collaboration with David McFarland he discovered that the gas contained nearly 12% of helium. No helium in natural gas had been discovered prior to that time, although it had been found in 1894 that helium existed on the earth, and might be extracted in small quantities from the atmosphere and from minerals. Cady was a consultant when helium reserves were later found in Texas and Colorado.
Hamilton Cady | Career
In 1931, Urey set out to find it. Urey and George Murphy calculated from the Balmer series that the heavy isotope should have lines redshifted by . Urey had access to a grating spectrograph, a sensitive device that had been recently installed at Columbia and was capable of resolving the Balmer series. With a resolution of 1 Å per millimetre, the machine should have produced a difference of about 1 millimetre. However, since only one atom in 4,500 was heavy, the line on the spectrograph was very faint. Urey therefore decided to delay publishing their results until he had more conclusive evidence that it was heavy hydrogen.
Harold Urey | Deuterium
In 1936 he was hired as a research chemist by E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company at their Jackson Laboratory in Deepwater, New Jersey. The discovery of Teflon is best described in Plunkett's own words: On the morning of April 6, 1938, Jack Rebok, my assistant, selected one of the TFE cylinders that we had been using the previous day and set up the apparatus ready to go. When he opened the valve — to let the TFE gas flow under its own pressure from the cylinder — nothing happened...We were in a quandary. I couldn't think of anything else to do under the circumstances, so we unscrewed the valve from the cylinder.
Roy J. Plunkett | Career
The fact that there was a component of air that does not support combustion was clear to Rutherford, although he was not aware that it was an element. Nitrogen was also studied at about the same time by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Henry Cavendish, and Joseph Priestley, who referred to it as "burnt air" or "phlogisticated air". Nitrogen gas was inert enough that Antoine Lavoisier referred to it as "mephitic air" or "azote", from the Greek word (azotikos), "no life". In an atmosphere of pure nitrogen, animals died and flames were extinguished. Though Lavoisier's name was not accepted in English, since it was pointed out that almost all gases (indeed, with the sole exception of oxygen) are mephitic, it is used in many languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Albanian, Turkish, etc.; the German "Stickstoff" similarly refers to the same characteristic, viz.
Nitrogen | History
Neil Bartlett (15 September 1932 – 5 August 2008) was a chemist who specialized in fluorine and compounds containing fluorine, and became famous for creating the first noble gas compounds. He taught chemistry at the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley.
Neil Bartlett (chemist) | Introduction
The problem was solved shortly by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. Porrett in 1813 made experiments with Rupert Kirk and William Wilson on the dangerous substance chloride of nitrogen.
Robert Porrett | Chemist
Robert Le Rossignol (27 April 1884 – 26 June 1976) was a British chemist. He is most known for his work with Fritz Haber on the fixation of nitrogen from atmospheric air, the Haber process. He was born in Saint Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands, and attended school there. He matriculated from the University of London in 1901 and graduated from University College London in 1905 where he remained, becoming a member of the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and a Fellow of the Chemical Society of London. In 1908–1909, he worked with Fritz Haber in Germany on the difficult problem of demonstrating ammonia synthesis from air, eventually producing a tabletop apparatus that worked at 200 atmospheres pressure.
Robert Le Rossignol | Introduction
It was first detected spectroscopically in late 1931 by Harold Urey, a chemist at Columbia University. Urey's collaborator, Ferdinand Brickwedde, distilled five liters of cryogenically produced liquid hydrogen to of liquid, using the low-temperature physics laboratory that had recently been established at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology). The technique had previously been used to isolate heavy isotopes of neon. The cryogenic boiloff technique concentrated the fraction of the mass-2 isotope of hydrogen to a degree that made its spectroscopic identification unambiguous.
Deuterium | Deuterium detected
These discoveries were made with the help of his addition of a gas separator to the particle accelerator to help filter out everything but the heavy elements they were looking for.
Victor Ninov | Career
Experiments on the properties of gases started early in the seventeenth century. By the middle of the seventeenth century Robert Boyle had derived the inverse relationship between the pressure and the volume of gases. About the same time, Guillaume Amontons started looking into temperature effects on gas. Various gas experiments continued for the next 200 years. During that time there were efforts to liquefy gases. Many new facts on the nature of gases had been discovered. For example, early in the nineteenth century Cagniard de la Tour had shown there was a temperature above which a gas could not be liquefied.
Liquefied natural gas | History
In 1800, Dalton became secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and in the following year he presented an important series of lectures, entitled "Experimental Essays" on the constitution of mixed gases; the pressure of steam and other vapours at different temperatures in a vacuum and in air; on evaporation; and on the thermal expansion of gases. The four essays, presented between 2 and 30 October 1801, were published in the "Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester" in 1802. The second essay opens with the remark, After describing experiments to ascertain the pressure of steam at various points between 0 and 100 °C (32 and 212 °F), Dalton concluded from observations of the vapour pressure of six different liquids, that the variation of vapour pressure for all liquids is equivalent, for the same variation of temperature, reckoning from vapour of any given pressure.
John Dalton | Gas laws
He was Rutherford's assistant director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory for over a decade at a time when it was one of the world's foremost centres for the study of physics, attracting students like John Cockcroft, Norman Feather, and Mark Oliphant. Chadwick followed his discovery of the neutron by measuring its mass. He anticipated that neutrons would become a major weapon in the fight against cancer. Chadwick left the Cavendish Laboratory in 1935 to become a professor of physics at the University of Liverpool, where he overhauled an antiquated laboratory and, by installing a cyclotron, made it an important centre for the study of nuclear physics.
James Chadwick | Introduction
Prof Daniel "Dan" Edwin Rutherford FRSE (4 January 1906 in Stirling – 9 November 1966 in St Andrews) was a Scottish mathematician, known for his work on the representation theory of symmetric groups.
Daniel Edwin Rutherford | Introduction
Johnston was a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley 1925-28 and an associate of cryogenics pioneer William Giauque when his experiments proved the existence of oxygen isotopes with atomic masses 17 and 18. Previously it had been believed that oxygen only existed as O; as atomic masses of other elements were calculated on the basis of 16.0 not 16.0035, this was a significant discovery. The work, published in 1929, also led to the discovery in 1932 of heavy hydrogen (deuterium) by Harold C Urey. Giauque was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for chemistry for this work, and did not forget to recognize Johnston's contribution.
Herrick L. Johnston | University of California
At Cambridge, Rutherford started to work with J. J. Thomson on the conductive effects of X-rays on gases, work which led to the discovery of the electron which Thomson presented to the world in 1897. Hearing of Becquerel's experience with uranium, Rutherford started to explore its radioactivity, discovering two types that differed from X-rays in their penetrating power. Continuing his research in Canada, he coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray in 1899 to describe the two distinct types of radiation. He then discovered that thorium gave off a gas which produced an emanation which was itself radioactive and would coat other substances.
Ernest Rutherford | Scientific research
The water-gas shift reaction was discovered by Italian physicist Felice Fontana in 1780. Water gas was made in England from 1828 by blowing steam through white-hot coke.
Water gas | History
In Andrews' experiments on phase transitions, he showed that carbon dioxide may be carried from any of the states we usually call liquid to any of those we usually call gas, without losing homogeneity. The mathematical physicist Willard Gibbs cited these results in support of the Gibbs free energy equation. They also set off a race among researchers to liquify various other gases. In 1877-78 Louis Paul Cailletet was the first to liquefy oxygen and nitrogen.
Thomas Andrews (scientist) | Work
Cameron had been trying to produce methane by extracting acids from human waste. He had made an airtight system because the production of methane is anaerobic, but still, he was not getting results. There was still air in the human waste that was interfering with the production of the methane by keeping the system aerobic.
Dean Cameron (inventor) | Invention
Trace amounts of nitrogen ions were detected but at levels consistent with an Enceladus source.
Gas torus | Introduction
Also, those radioelements that reside in the same places in the periodic system are chemically identical. Soddy called these chemically identical elements isotopes. For his study of radioactivity and the discovery of isotopes, Soddy was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Building from work by J. J. Thomson on the deflection of positively charged atoms by electric and magnetic fields, Francis Aston built the first mass spectrograph at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1919. His aim, which he easily achieved, was to separate the two isotopes of neon, and . Aston discovered that the masses of all the particles are whole numbers (the whole number rule): that is, the masses of all the isotopes are whole number multiples of the mass of the hydrogen atom.
Discovery of the neutron | Discovery of isotopes
Lawrence was asked to give a presentation on the cyclotron. Lawrence's claims of limitless energy met a very different reception in Solvay. He ran into withering skepticism from the Cavendish Laboratory's James Chadwick, the physicist who had discovered the neutron in 1932, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935. In a British accent that sounded condescending to American ears, Chadwick suggested that what Lawrence's team was observing was contamination of their apparatus. When he returned to Berkeley, Lawrence mobilized his team to go painstakingly over the results to gather enough evidence to convince Chadwick. Meanwhile, at the Cavendish laboratory, Rutherford and Mark Oliphant found that deuterium fuses to form helium-3, which causes the effect that the cyclotroneers had observed.
Ernest Lawrence | Reception
Graham experimentally proved the dependency of gas diffusion on molecular weight, which is now known as Graham's law.
Permeation | Thomas Graham (chemist, 1805–1869)
He was demobilised in 1919 and offered a government grant to study at university, but his demobilisation came too late in the year for him to start his chemistry degree then. Instead he began his studies in 1920 at East London College. The degree examinations at the time were held after the summer holiday rather than before, so to help with his family's dire financial situation (his father had died in 1918, leaving his mother financially destitute) he again worked for the Gas Light and Coke Company as a junior chemist, where he was tasked with finding a better way to extract natural gas from coke than the process used at the time.
Walter Thomas James Morgan | Academia
Lockyer and English chemist Edward Frankland named the element with the Greek word for the Sun, ἥλιος ("helios"). In 1881, Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri detected helium on Earth for the first time through its D spectral line, when he analyzed a material that had been sublimated during a recent eruption of Mount Vesuvius. On March 26, 1895, Scottish chemist, Sir William Ramsay, isolated helium on Earth by treating the mineral cleveite (a variety of uraninite with at least 10% rare earth elements) with mineral acids. Ramsay was looking for argon but, after separating nitrogen and oxygen from the gas, liberated by sulfuric acid, he noticed a bright yellow line that matched the D line observed in the spectrum of the Sun.
Helium | Scientific discoveries
Separating radium from the barium in the ore proved very difficult. It took three years for them to produce a tenth of a gram of radium chloride, and they never did manage to isolate polonium. In 1898, Ernest Rutherford noted that thorium gave off a radioactive gas. In examining the radiation, he classified Becquerel radiation into two types, which he called α (alpha) and β (beta) radiation. Subsequently, Paul Villard discovered a third type of Becquerel radiation which, following Rutherford's scheme, were called "gamma rays", and Curie noted that radium also produced a radioactive gas. Identifying the gas chemically proved frustrating; Rutherford and Frederick Soddy found it to be inert, much like argon.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Radioactivity
Rutherford was knighted in 1914. During World War I, he worked on a top secret project to solve the practical problems of submarine detection by sonar. In 1916, he was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal. In 1919, he returned to the Cavendish succeeding J. J. Thomson as the Cavendish professor and Director. Under him, Nobel Prizes were awarded to James Chadwick for discovering the neutron (in 1932), John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton for an experiment which was to be known as "splitting the atom" using a particle accelerator, and Edward Appleton for demonstrating the existence of the ionosphere. In 1925, Rutherford pushed calls to the New Zealand Government to support education and research, which led to the formation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in the following year.
Ernest Rutherford | Later years and honours
In his 1911 paper (see above), Rutherford assumed that the central charge of the atom was positive, but a negative charge would have fitted his scattering model just as well. In a 1913 paper, Rutherford declared that the "nucleus" (as he now called it) was indeed positively charged, based on the result of experiments exploring the scattering of alpha particles in various gases. In 1917, Rutherford and his assistant William Kay began exploring the passage of alpha particles through gases such as hydrogen and nitrogen. In an experiment where they shot a beam of alpha particles through hydrogen, the alpha particles knocked the hydrogen nuclei forwards in the direction of the beam, not backwards.
Geiger–Marsden experiment | Rutherford determines the nucleus is positively charged
His external examiner was Ralph Fowler from the University of Cambridge, who was Paul Dirac's PhD supervisor. In 1929, with the benefit of an Aitchison travelling scholarship from the University of Melbourne, Massey went to Trinity College, Cambridge to perform research at the Cavendish Laboratory led by Ernest Rutherford. The scholarship expired after two years, but he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1931. At this time the Cavendish Laboratory was one of the leading centres of physics in the world. In 1932 Cavendish laboratory scientists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the atomic nucleus, James Chadwick discovered the neutron, and Patrick Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini confirmed the existence of the positron.
Harrie Massey | Career
The discovery of the noble gases aided in the development of a general understanding of atomic structure. In 1895, French chemist Henri Moissan attempted to form a reaction between fluorine, the most electronegative element, and argon, one of the noble gases, but failed. Scientists were unable to prepare compounds of argon until the end of the 20th century, but these attempts helped to develop new theories of atomic structure. Learning from these experiments, Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed in 1913 that the electrons in atoms are arranged in shells surrounding the nucleus, and that for all noble gases except helium the outermost shell always contains eight electrons.
Noble gas | History
http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/4f930d90-53c2-4d02-bcfc-6616c13fdd46
Thomas Botfield | External links
During this period at UCL, Rankine worked under the Irish physicist Frederick Thomas Trouton. In 1908, he and Trouton carried out what become known as the Trouton–Rankine experiment. This experiment was among a number being carried out at the time, and was intended as a test of aether theory and Einstein's special relativity, with Trouton and Rankine's null result providing support for the latter theory. Two years later, in 1910, Rankine obtained his D.Sc in Physics (awarded by the University of London). A further two years after that, in 1912, he was elected a fellow of University College. His research in this period was on the viscosity of gases, and he invented a viscosimeter (the "Rankine viscosimeter"), enabling him to carry out experimental determinations of the "Sutherland constant" (described by William Sutherland).
Alexander Rankine | University College and World War I
The initial discovery was quite serendipitous. Rosenberg was looking into the effects of an electric field on the growth of bacteria. He noticed that bacteria ceased to divide when placed in an electric field and eventually traced the cause of this phenomenon to the platinum electrode he was using.
Barnett Rosenberg | Introduction
In 1804 Gay-Lussac made several daring ascents of over 7,000 meters above sea level in hydrogen-filled balloons—a feat not equaled for another 50 years—that allowed him to investigate other aspects of gases. Not only did he gather magnetic measurements at various altitudes, but he also took pressure, temperature, and humidity measurements and samples of air, which he later analyzed chemically.
History of chemistry | New elements and gas laws
Nevertheless, Rutherford had conjectured the existence of the deuteron, a +1 charge particle of mass 2, and the neutron, a neutral particle of mass 1. The former is the nucleus of deuterium, discovered in 1931 by Harold Urey. The mass of the hypothetical neutral particle would be little different from that of the proton. Rutherford determined that such a zero-charge particle would be difficult to detect by available techniques. By 1921 Rutherford and William Harkins had independently named the uncharged particle the "neutron", while about that same time the word "proton" was adopted for the hydrogen nucleus. Neutron was apparently constructed from the Latin root for "neutral" and the Greek ending "-on" (by imitation of "electron" and "proton").
Discovery of the neutron | Rutherford atom
Graham's research on the diffusion of gases was triggered by his reading about the observation of German chemist Johann Döbereiner that hydrogen gas diffused out of a small crack in a glass bottle faster than the surrounding air diffused in to replace it. Graham measured the rate of diffusion of gases through plaster plugs, through very fine tubes, and through small orifices. In this way he slowed down the process so that it could be studied quantitatively. He first stated in 1831 that the rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of its density, and later in 1848 showed that this rate is inversely proportional to the square root of the molar mass.
Graham's law | History
At Innsbruck, Cremer researched the hydrogenation of acetylene and found difficulty separating two gases with similar adsorption heats using the common methods of the day. She was aware of the liquid absorption chromatography research going on at Innsbruck, so she thought of a parallel method to separate gases which used an inert carrier gas as the mobile phase. She developed mathematical relationships and equations and instrumentation for the first gas chromatograph. Separate components were detected by a thermal conductivity detector. She initially submitted a short academic paper in 1944 to "Naturwissenschaften", which was accepted and she informed them that future experimental work would follow.
Erika Cremer | Gas separation discovery and development
That this can be used as a means of isotope separation was first demonstrated by Klaus Clusius and Gerhard Dickel in Germany in 1938, who used it to separate isotopes of neon. They used an apparatus called a "column", consisting of a vertical tube with a hot wire down the centre. The advantage of the technique was that it was simple in design and there were no moving parts. But it could take months to reach equilibrium, required a lot of energy, and needed high temperatures that could cause a problem with the uranium hexafluoride. Another line of research at Liverpool was measuring the fission cross section of uranium-235, on which Frisch and Peierls' calculations depended.
MAUD Committee | University of Liverpool
Several important early physics discoveries were made here, including the discovery of the electron by J.J. Thomson (1897) the Townsend discharge by John Sealy Townsend, and the development of the cloud chamber by C.T.R. Wilson. Ernest Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1919. Under his leadership the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner was performed by students working under his direction; John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton.
Cavendish Laboratory | Physics
J. Thomson. Wilhelm Wien in 1898 identified the hydrogen ion as the particle with the highest charge-to-mass ratio in ionized gases. Following the discovery of the atomic nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1911, Antonius van den Broek proposed that the place of each element in the periodic table (its atomic number) is equal to its nuclear charge. This was confirmed experimentally by Henry Moseley in 1913 using X-ray spectra. In 1917 (in experiments reported in 1919 and 1925), Rutherford proved that the hydrogen nucleus is present in other nuclei, a result usually described as the discovery of protons. These experiments began after Rutherford had noticed that, when alpha particles were shot into air (mostly nitrogen), his scintillation detectors showed the signatures of typical hydrogen nuclei as a product.
Proton | History
In 1867 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh his proposer was John Hutton Balfour. The University of Edinburgh awarded him a second honorary doctorate (LLD) in 1883.
Daniel Rutherford Haldane | Life