RAYLEIGH, Lord; RAMSAY, William. Argon, A New Constituent of the Atmosphere.
London: Harrison and Sons, 1894. First edition.

Rare offprint of the true first edition of their joint Nobel paper, preceding the expanded version published in the Philosophical Transactions 1895 (see Dibner 50).

(DSB, XIII, p.102:) “The discovery and isolation of argon was undoubtedly Rayleigh’s most dramatic and famous accomplishment. It emerged as the solution to a scientific puzzle, and Rayleigh was usually at his best when faced by a puzzle. The difficulty was encountered in high-precision measurements of the density of nitrogen, undertaken in the first instance with the aim of obtaining better values of the atomic weight of that element. It was found that the density of nitrogen prepared from ammonia was about one part in two hundred less than the density about one part in two hundred less than the density of nitrogen obtained from air. …

The ultimate solution to the peculiar problem of the density of nitrogen was suggested by the reading of a paper published by Henry Cavendish in 1795. He had oxidized the nitrogen in a given volume of air by sparking the air with a primitive static machine. Cavendish found that no matter how long he conducted the sparking, there was always a small residue of gas that apparently could not be further oxidized. He abandoned the research at that point. Had he continued, he presumably would have been the discoverer of argon. Rayleigh decided to push Cavendish’s experiment to a conclusion, acting finally on the conviction that there really was another constituent of atmospheric air in addition to the commonly accepted ones.

Rayleigh used an induction coil to provide the electrical discharge for the oxidation of nitrogen, but the process of accumulating enough of the new gas to test its properties was a slow one. In the meantime Sir William Ramsay, having noted Rayleigh’s nitrogen-density problem, proceeded to attempt the isolation of the unknown gas by much faster chemical means. …

In the end both shared in the recognition for the discovery of argon and presented their results in a joint paper. There was the usual skepticism over the validity of the result, especially on the part of chemists, who found it hard to believe that a genuinely new element could have remained undetected for so long. The relative chemical inertness of argon was, of course, the explanation. ...

It was largely because of this discovery that Rayleigh was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1904, while Ramsay received the Nobel Prize in chemistry the same year.”

Dibner 50 (the later expanded version of this paper printed in The Philosophical Transactions, vol. 186, 1895). Interlibrum, 100 First Editions of Epochal Achievements in the History of Science 1850-1986, no. 68 (the 1896 American printing).

Offprint from The Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. 57, pp. 265-287. 8vo: 216 x 139 mm. Original grey printed wrappers, some mild creasing to the upper left corner of the front wrapper, tinny peace of the lower right corner chipped away, some mild spotting and smudging, in all a fine copy in its original state. Pp. [1],266-287[1:blank].