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You will understand, of course, that krypton, neon, and zenon are the new gases of the atmosphere whose existence no one suspected until Professor Ramsay ferreted them out a few years ago and isolated them. In one sense there should be nothing mysterious about substances that every air-breathing creature on the globe has been imbibing pretty constantly ever since lungs came into fashion.
Each whiff of colorless gas in its test-tube interferes with the light passing through it in such a way that when viewed through a prism it gives a spectrum of altogether unique lines, which stamp it as krypton, neon, or zenon as definitely as certain familiar and more tangible properties stamp the liquid which imprisons it as mercury.
In the course of these studies it became evident to them that the presence of argon alone did not fully account for all the phenomena they observed in handling liquefied air, and in 1898 Professor Ramsay was again able to electrify his audience at the Royal Society by the announcement of the discovery, in pretty rapid succession, of three other elementary substances as constituents of the atmosphere, these three being the ones just referred to krypton, neon, and zenon.
As far back as the 1940s, astronomers had begun to suspect that the Moon was, after all, not entirely airless. There would be traces of heavy gases argon, neon, xenon, krypton, and volcanic carbon dioxide. It would be expanded far upward above the surface, because the feeble lunar gravity could not give it sufficient weight to compress it very much.
What would Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, and Cavendish, the discoverer of nitrogen, think could they step into the laboratory of Professor Ramsay and see test-tubes containing argon and helium and krypton and neon and zenon?
But your interest will hardly fail to be arrested when Professor Ramsay, indicating one and another of these little tubes, says: "Here you see, or fail to see, all the krypton that has ever been in isolated existence in the world, and here all the neon, and here, again, all the zenon."
Test it more accurately, will you you try for nitrogen and I'll try the component inert gasses." They ran the analyses rapidly, and in a very short time less than an hour their results stood at 23 per cent oxygen, .1 per cent carbon dioxide, 68 per cent argon, 6 per cent nitrogen, 2 per cent helium, 5 per cent neon, .05 per cent hydrogen, and the rest krypton and xenon apparently.
The whole upper vault is charged with pale krypton vapours, which our skin friction may excite to unholy manifestations. Between the upper and lower levels 5000 and 7000, hints the Mark Boat we may perhaps bolt through if... Our bow clothes itself in blue flame and falls like a sword. No human skill can keep pace with the changing tensions.
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