William Ramsay, the discoverer of noble gases!

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

Image: "Ramsay william h1" by Leslie Ward - Vanity Fair, 2 December 1908

Today, 2 October is the birthday of William Ramsay, the discoverer of noble gases! Born in 1852, Ramsay was a Nobel Prize winning Scottish chemist who discovered argon, krypton, neon, and xenon! When he isolated argon, the first noble gas discovered, he found it to have very low chemical reactivity and so named it after the Greek word for slow.

In case you were wondering, noble gases are a group of chemical elements that are odourless, colourless, have very low reactivity, and can exist as stable single atoms under standard temperature and pressure. Today, noble gases are used in a host of applications from neon in light bulbs to MRI scanners cooled with liquid helium.