107 Stories About Chemistry
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What didn't chemists do to make them react! They heated them to temperatures at which the most refractory metals would turn into boiling hot liquids; they cooled them until they became solids; they passed enormous electric discharges through them, and they subjected them to attack by the most furious chemical agents. But all in vain! Where other elements would long have surrendered and entered into chemical union, the inert gases remained impassive. "You are wasting your time," they seemed to say to the investigator, "We have no desire to enter into any reaction. We're above all that! And their arrogance earned them another title, that of "noble" gases. But then this title has an ironic tinge to it. Ramsay, who discovered helium in terrestrial minerals, had reason to be proud; he had presented the world with a new chemical element which really existed. A chemical one! Sir William Ramsay would have paid dearly to make helium behave like the other inhabitants of the Periodic Table, namely, to combine with hydrogen, oxygen, or sulphur. So that esteemed professors could tell from their rostra, about the oxides and salts of helium. But helium, the first in the group of inert gases, failed him. At the end of the last century the British scientists Ramsay and Rayleigh disovered neon and argon, krypton and xenon. Later radon closed the list of chemical sloths. They were all elements with atomic weights of their own. But honestly, one could hardly bring oneself to prefix the word "chemical", say, to the words "element argon."
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