-
Hydrogen
1500s the alchemist Paracelsus noted that the bubbles given when iron filings were added to sulfuric acid were flammable. In 1671 Robert Boyle made the same observation. Neither followed their discovery of hydrogen, and so Henry Cavendish gets the credit. In 1766 he collected the bubbles and showed that they were different from other gases. He later showed that when hydrogen burns it forms water, thereby ending the belief that water was an element. The gas was given its name hydro-gen -
Nitrogen
Nitrogen gas itself was obtained in the 1760s by both Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley and they did this by removing the oxygen from air. They noted it extinguished a lighted candle and that a mouse breathing it would soon die. Neither man deduced that it was an element. The first person to suggest this was a young student Daniel Rutherford in his doctorate thesis of September 1772 at Edinburgh, Scotland. -
Oxygen
discovering oxygen is shared by three chemists: Joseph Priestley was the first to publish of oxygen,in 1774 by focussing sunlight on to mercuric oxide and collecting the gas which came off. He noted that a candle burned more brightly in it and that it made breathing easier Carl Wilhelm Scheele had produced oxygen in June 1771. He had written his discovery but was published until 1777. Antoine Lavoisier also claimed to have discovered oxygen, and proposed that the new gas be called oxy-gène -
Argon
when Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay first separated it from liquid air. Argon was discovered as a result of trying to explain why the density of nitrogen extracted from air differed from that obtained by the decomposition of ammonia.Ramsay removed all the nitrogen from the gas he extracted from air,and did this by reacting it with hot magnesium,He was then left with a gas that would not react and when he examined it he saw new groups of red and green lines,confirming that it was a new element. -
Neon
In 1898, William Ramsay and Morris Travers They were expecting to find a lighter gas which would fit above argon in the periodic table. They then experimented,this time allowing solid argon to evaporate slowly under pressure and collected the gas which came off first,and when they put a sample of the new gas into their atomic spectrometer it startled them by the brilliant red glow that we now associate with neon signs.Ramsay named the new gas neon,basing it on neos,the Greek word for new.
