The Gases of the Atmosphere: The History of Their Discovery

Before we knew what we breathed, we believed air was a single substance. This is the story of how we learned otherwise, told by the man who helped uncover the truth. William Ramsay, who would later win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of noble gases, traces the centuries-long struggle to understand what fills the sky above us. From the misguided theories of antiquity to the breakthrough experiments of the 18th and 19th centuries, Ramsay reconstructs the mental labor of scientists who peered into air and saw nothing yet discovered everything. We meet Robert Boyle, John Mayow, and others who wrestled with combustion, respiration, and the invisible stuff that surrounded them. The narrative builds toward the discovery of argon and the elegant simplicity of a periodic table that finally made sense of the elements. What elevates this book beyond a mere chronology is Ramsay's obvious delight in the detective work of science. He shows how wrong guesses led to right questions, and how stubborn curiosity eventually mapped the invisible architecture of our atmosphere.