mr roh
People have long been used to the colorful and dazzling neon lights on city streets. However, many people may not know that the beautiful night in the city can only be a fable without the scientific discovery of Englishman Rassem and his discovery of neon.
British chemist Ramsey won the 1904 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering gaseous inert elements such as helium, neon, argon, xenon and radon and determining their positions in the periodic table. Ramsey was born in Glasgow, Scotland on 1852. His father is a civil engineer and his family life is relatively comfortable. My father didn't get married until he was in his forties, and Ramsey was the only child. His parents love him very much. His grandfather once opened an ancestral washing and dyeing shop, and Ramsey learned a lot of chemical knowledge from his grandfather. Ramsey has a wide range of interests. As an only child, his parents spent all their energy on him and received a good family education. At the age of 3, his mother began to teach him to read and read the Bible, and taught him to play the violin regularly every day. He had learned many words before he went to school and played the violin very well. Seeing the clever Rassem, friends and relatives have all kinds of speculations about his future development. Seeing that he plays the violin well, people think that being a violinist is the most suitable. Knowing that he knows several languages, he thinks that being a diplomat must be excellent. But Ramsey's favorite thing to do is to become a football star. Football is a brave sport, and fierce confrontation can best show people's courage and demeanor.
But an accident changed Ramsey's hobby. In a football match, the brave Ramsey fell down. He was carried off the court and taken to the hospital. Ramsey hurt his leg and needs to rest. He is lying in bed doing nothing, and his heart is so stuffy. There happened to be a chemistry book written by Graham, a British chemistry professor. At first Ramsey just wandered around for fun. Who knows that as soon as I read it, I was attracted by the content of the book and couldn't put it down. In particular, the method of making fireworks in the book aroused Ramsey's interest. After leaving the hospital, Ramsey can no longer play football, and he no longer dreams of becoming a football star, because he has a new direction and wants to be a chemist.
Chemistry is a highly experimental subject. Ramsey doesn't understand chemical theory, but some simple experiments are very attractive. According to the requirements in the book, he began to do experiments. The experimental process of producing oxygen and hydrogen is relatively simple and the equipment used is not complicated. Ramsey bought all kinds of chemicals, flasks, test tubes and so on. And turned his room into a "small chemistry laboratory". Doing chemical experiments requires a very serious attitude. If you are not careful, you will make mistakes. Fortunately, Ramsey is a serious boy. Although his "small chemical laboratory" sometimes explodes, there has never been a major accident. Although Ramsey was obsessed with chemical experiments, he didn't relax in other subjects. It took him eight years to complete all the primary and secondary school courses that others had to complete in 12 years, and his grades were very good. 14 years old, admitted to Glasgow University. 1872, when he was only 20 years old, he got his doctorate on the thesis of toluene and nitrobenzoic acid.
1892, the British physicist Rayleigh found a strange thing when measuring the weight of nitrogen from different sources. Nitrogen obtained from air is 1.2572g per liter, while nitrogen obtained from ammonia decomposition is 1.2508g per liter. It is 0.0064g lighter than the density of nitrogen in the air, and the density of nitrogen is 6.4mg, which is equivalent to the weight of a flea. Riley couldn't figure out why there was such a result, so he asked his friend Ramsey to study it together.
Ramsey suspects that the problem may be that the nitrogen obtained from the air is not pure nitrogen and is mixed with impurity gas heavier than nitrogen. How can we find out this impurity gas? Ramsey made a demonstration experiment in class to make magnesium burn in the air. In this way, magnesium can not only combine with oxidation in air, but also combine with nitriding to form magnesium nitride. Now nitrogen in the air can be removed in this way. He passed the air from which water, carbon dioxide and oxygen were removed through a porcelain tube filled with red-hot magnesium chips, so that nitrogen in the air was separated by forming magnesium nitride. This has been repeated many times, and what is left in the tube is that kind of impurity gas. It is determined that it is heavier than nitrogen, almost one and a half times as heavy as nitrogen. In this way, the weight difference between nitrogen obtained from air and nitrogen obtained from ammonia decomposition is solved. 1894 August 13, Rayleigh and Ramsey announced their new discovery to natural scientists who were meeting there in Oxford Science City, England: a new unknown element is around us, which is the same as oxygen and nitrogen; There is about15g of this gas in every cubic meter of air, and there are dozens of kilograms of this gas in the venue.
Hearing this, the scientists attending the meeting were dumbfounded. "How did this strange thing happen? Have you found any new gases in the air? " This new gas hardly reacts with any elements. Rayleigh and Ramsey named it Argonne, which means "laziness" in Greek.
On August 1868 and 18, when Zhan Sen, a British astronomer and a French astronomer, analyzed the prominence (corona) with an optical microscope, they determined a substance that people had never found before according to the spectral lines. They think it may be a special celestial substance, which is not found on the earth, but only on the sun. Therefore, Rockall decided to call this new substance solar helium. Helium means the sun in Greek.
Ramsey continued to study various properties of argon. On the morning of February 1859, he received a letter from chemist Henry Miles, telling him that American geologist Leibner had heated yttrium uranium ore in sulfuric acid, and the gas released as a result could neither spontaneously ignite nor support combustion. At that time, it was thought that this gas was nitrogen, but now it may also be argon. Maybe yttrium uranium ore contains compounds of uranium and argon.
According to Maiers' suggestion, Ramsey repeated Leibbrand's experiment and collected several cubic centimeters of gas. When the gas is analyzed by spectrum, something unexpected happens: the spectrum of this gas is neither nitrogen nor argon. So what kind of substance is it? Ramsey recalled all the spectra of various substances he knew, and none of them were similar. After repeated thinking, he suddenly remembered the helium on the sun discovered by Zhan Sen and Rocar 27 years ago. He checked that the spectral lines were roughly the same, but Ramsey had no instrument to accurately determine the position of the spectral lines in the spectrum. Besides, is the element of the sun so easy to find? He decided to ask crookes, the best spectroscopy expert in Britain at that time, for help. He only told crookes that he had discovered a new gas, suggested calling it "Krypton", and asked crookes to determine the spectral line position of this new gas. 1On the morning of March 23rd, 895, Ramsey received a telegram from crookes: "Krypton-helium, please come and have a look. Crookes "
In this way, helium found on the sun 27 years ago was also found on the earth. On the same day, Ramsey informed Betro, president of the French Academy of Sciences, that helium had been found on the earth. Ramsey was the first chemist in the world to obtain the element of the sun. He reacted with helium with many substances. Therefore, helium, like argon, is not combined with any substance and is also an inert gas.
Can helium be found in the air? Ramsey's method is to cool the air into liquid and then gradually evaporate it. He thought that oxygen and nitrogen would evaporate first, while helium would evaporate slowly, so he opened the mouth of liquid air in Dewar bottle and let it evaporate. When there is only a little liquid air left, he collects the evaporated gas in the liquid air and then removes oxygen and nitrogen. Through spectral analysis, Ramsey thinks he can find helium, but there is no characteristic spectral line of helium. Ramsey was wrong this time. In fact, helium evaporates faster than oxygen and nitrogen, and has already escaped. But Ramsey still got something. He accidentally discovered another new element "Krypton". Learning from his failure, Ramsey changed his experimental method. This time he proved that helium does exist in the air, and at this time he discovered a new gas "neon". Since then, Ramsey has discovered two new gases, xenon and radon. In this way, inert gases such as helium, neon, argon, xenon, radon and krypton were discovered by Ramsey, except that helium was first discovered from the sun by Zhan Sen and lockyer through a spectroscope. But radon was found in 19 10. This is eight years after Ramsey won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Ramsey retired at the age of 60 in 19 12, but he still worked in his own small chemical laboratory until his death in 19 16. Chemistry is the lifelong companion of this great scientist. He once said, "See more, learn more and try more. Never show off your achievements. If a person is afraid to spend time and trouble, he will accomplish nothing. "
Neon was discovered on the basis of krypton, and the remaining gas was fractionated by decompression to collect the volatile part of argon. This part of the gas has an extremely magnificent spectrum, with many red lines, many light green lines, and several purple lines and yellow lines, which are very obvious. In high vacuum, it can even emit bright phosphorescence. This inspired people to use it for lighting, so neon lights were born.