The discovery of argon created a crisis of sorts for the periodic table: as the only element of its kind, it had no family resemblances, and the best estimate of its atomic weight put it among entirely dissimilar elements. Some chemists (including Dmitri Mendeleev, one of the founders of the periodic table) were skeptical of the reported properties of argon, and some physicists were ready to discard the periodic law. The isolation of terrestrial helium shortly afterwards made argon appear less of an aberration. The existence of a pair of monatomic "inert" gases gave William Ramsay, a co-discoverer of argon, the conviction to predict the existence of a whole family of noble gases and to look for the other members. Within a few years, Ramsay and his assistant Morris Travers found three more inert gases. Belief in the periodic system was behind Ramsay's confidence that more elements of this type existed, and isolation of those additional members of the group reinforced the status of the periodic table, which survived the addition of an unforeseen new column.

Noble gases and the periodic table: A study in mutual reinforcement

252nd National Meeting (2016)

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