William Ramsey: He Dissolved a Rock and Found the Sun

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]surface of the earth. In 1895, a mineralogist brought Ramsay a sample of a uranium-bearing mineral called cleveite. It was known to release gas when treated with acid, and Ramsay, now acutely alert to the possibility of undiscovered inert gases, decided to investigate.

[00:00:18]He dissolved the cleveite in sulfuric acid, collected the gas that emerged, and submitted it to spectroscopic analysis.

[00:00:26]The lines that appeared stopped him cold.

[00:00:29]They matched perfectly with lines that Janssen and Lockyer had observed 27 years earlier. Ramsay had found helium on Earth, the first, and still one of the most remarkable instances in scientific history of a gas being predicted through astronomical observation, and then confirmed in a terrestrial laboratory. In a single afternoon, helium went from being a mystery in the Sun's atmosphere to a real, physical, tangible element sitting in a glass tube in a London laboratory.

[00:01:00]He wrote to his wife that evening with barely contained excitement, describing what he had seen, and telling her he believed he had made a discovery of the first