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Updated: May 12, 2025
Having discovered so interesting a substance as argon, Professor Ramsay and his assistants naturally devoted much time and attention to elucidating the peculiarities of the new substance.
It is well known that, to them, except in certain particular bodies like the vapour of mercury and argon, the molecule comprises several atoms, and that, in compound bodies, the number of these atoms may even be fairly considerable. But physicists rarely needed to have recourse to the consideration of these atoms.
Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt of the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the telephone as a curiosity, electric traction as a practical absurdity. There was no argon, no radium, no phagocytes at least to my knowledge, and aluminium was a dear, infrequent metal.
It will be recalled with what astonishment the scientific and the unscientific world alike received the announcement made to the Royal Society in 1895 of the discovery of argon, and the proof that this hitherto unsuspected constituent of the atmosphere really constitutes about one per cent, of the bulk of atmospheric nitrogen, as previously estimated.
His researches have, in fact, proved that the pressure of air congealed by liquid hydrogen cannot exceed the millionth of an atmosphere. We have, then, in this process, an original and rapid means of creating an excellent vacuum in apparatus of very different kinds a means which, in certain cases, may be particularly convenient. According to him, neither helium nor argon is absorbed by charcoal.
And right actions, or rather a character which produces such, is the last aim of all knowledge, and especially of all moral and religious truth. So 'the truth' is not 'argon', it is a ferment.
Spectrum analysis of the black powder points unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is possible that it combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once with deadly effect upon some constituent in the blood.
The argon atom is just as closely in contact with the oxygen in the atmosphere as with the nitrogen; it simply repels each indiscriminately. But consider a little further; the argon atom not only repels all advance on the part of oxygen and nitrogen, but it equally holds itself aloof from its own particular kindred atoms.
But again, how chances it that different atoms attract one another in such varying degrees, so that, for example, fluorine unites with everything it touches, argon with nothing? And how is it that different kinds of atoms can hold to themselves such varying numbers of fellow-atoms oxygen one, hydrogen two, and so on? These are questions for the future.
Professor Biggleswade, who had heard vaguely of and rather looked down upon such new-fangled toys as radium and thorium and helium and argon for the latest astonishing developments in the theory of radio-activity had brought Sir Angus McCurdie his world-wide fame said somewhat ironically: "If the experiments were so important, why didn't you lock yourself up with your test tubes and electric batteries and finish them alone?"
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