Wilhelm Ramsay

Transcription

UCL is and always has been a place full of inspiring minds. We are an institution of tremendous risk-takers — those who push the boundaries of academia and society. We have a culture of innovation in the arts and sciences that is shaping the way we live and tackling some of the world's most important challenges. One of the greatest minds UCL has seen was Sir William Ramsay, who won the Nobel prize for his achievements in chemistry including the discovery of the five noble gases. Ramsey’s discovery of the noble gases is extremely important because by the end of the 19th century, all of chemistry was about one element reacting with another. Now, the astonishing thing that Ramsey did was to discover a set of hitherto unsuspected elements that showed absolutely no chemistry at all, and this was completely shocking. One of the things that Ramsey did was getting these elements to emit light and, in doing so, he was able to identify them as completely different from anything that had been found before. This is the first element that Ramsey discovered and that was argon. It has this really lovely purple colour. Second element he discovered was neon, and neon is really the most famous one, which gives this brilliant orange colour. Their optical properties remain central to many of their applications today. For example, the supermarket checkout: we have red lasers, the helium-neon laser, which is used to scan barcodes all over the place. We still use argon in our lightbulbs. We use xenon in some of the fancy bluish light bulbs that we have in automobiles. Ramsey’s discoveries have really kind of crept into all parts of our everyday lives. Ramsey wasn't merely a great researcher, he was also a great teacher. He had, I think twenty-six students who became professors in chemistry around the world. Now, in those days, there weren’t many universities. Each university had one professor, so he populated half the universities of the world with his professors, who carried his great legacy of research and teaching into what they taught. I think his legacy persists in UCL today: the excitement for research is still there and the standard of teaching is still there. There are tremendous facilities and a lot of enthusiastic and exciting people. In London, which is very, very central, we have all kinds of connections to other institutes. University College still does stand at the forefront of the research which is going on.