Characters in Rutherford's life

William Ramsay (1852-1916)

A talented British chemist, William Ramsay gained his fame thanks to the discovery of noble gases in the 1890s. This earned him a Nobel Prize in 1904. Alas, the rest of his career was peppered with thunderous announcements of new discoveries... quite often called into question by other experimenters... including Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford.

Pictures:

William Ramsay in 1904. Source : NobelPrize.org

Apart from Lord Kelvin , William Ramsay was undoubtedly Ernest Rutherford's most virulent opponent.

Their confrontation began in 1903, when, working with Frederick Soddy in London , Ramsay demonstrated the formation of helium during radioactive decay. It was an interesting breakthrough, which Rutherford, on a trip to England that summer, was able to witness.

The concern is that Soddy and Rutherford, who had worked together in Montreal , had established a work plan by the time the first of the two had left Canada. Their goal was not to carry out the same operations twice on each side of the Atlantic. They had thus decided that Rutherford would be in charge of highlighting the helium. To see the two London chemists carrying out this experiment therefore made him somewhat angry. Rutherford made no comment, but swore to remember this trick.

That said, and despite his irritation, Rutherford even went so far as to lend some of the radium he had just bought in the English capital. It was indeed fundamental that Ramsay and Soddy reproduce their experiment to confirm their results. And Rutherford placed the advances of science far above his susceptibility.

Ramsay didn't stop there though. In 1907, he claimed to demonstrate that it was possible to modify the transformation of radium, by changing the reagents to which it was subjected.

He claimed to have obtained, instead of helium, either neon under the action of water, or lithium in the presence of copper. He thus himself questioned his results of 1903, as well as the conclusions of all the teams which, throughout the world, had worked on the subject.

Whether Marie Curie , in Paris , Rutherford, now in Manchester , or their colleagues in Germany or in the New World, all scientists agreed that it was impossible to influence a radioactive decay, either by increasing the temperature or the pressure, or by mixing the radium with various reagents,

But one of Rutherford's principles was never to neglect even the most far-fetched lead.

With one of his Manchester assistants, he set out to reproduce Ramsay's experiment in which radium was transformed into neon, while in Paris, Marie Curie, supported by Ellen Gleditsch , undertook to try to reproduce the lithium production reaction

For the two pairs, this resulted in a waste of time and radium – two already scarce resources – but the scientific process required going through this._cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b- 136bad5cf58d_

Bertram Boltwood , Rutherford's American friend, was somewhat more critical of Ramsay's claims. In a letter to Rutherford he wrote:

“I wonder why he hasn't yet shown that mixing radium emanation with kerosene provides lobster salad. »

and in another:

“Your English chemists form a veritable orchestra of incompetents, and it is Ramsay who holds the baton. If you can refute his latest fit of madness, I hope this olibrius will be buried so deep in the mire that even his name will be forgotten forever."

Rutherford managed to demonstrate that the neon that Ramsay thought he had formed actually came from the outside air and that its presence was explained by its gaseous character and by the fact that Ramsay must have badly sealed his containers._cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_

Marie Curie's conclusions were no more positive for the English chemist, since she determined that the lithium detected at the end of the reaction did not come from a transformation of the radium, but was simply an impurity present in the glass bottles used.

Two rookie mistakes that would have earned Ramsay the fate Boltwood predicted.

But nothing happened; and William Ramsay continued to deploy his talents, both to botch his experiments and to harm his neighbor.

In 1908, in fact, when one of his assistants, a certain Otto Brill, brought him back from Vienna a parcel of radium which should have been shared with Rutherford, Ramsay declared that it would be a pity to divide this endowment... and kept everything for him.

Stefan Meyer, the head of the Viennese radium institute, supplier of this metal to the English, was informed of the affair. He promptly reshipped, graciously, the quantity Rutherford needed. And this time, the package did not pass through London.