Besides winning the 1904 Nobel Prize for discovering a whole family of gases, William Ramsay did well at just about anything he tried--sports, languages, math, music. He even learned glassblowing so that he could make the vessels he needed for his lab experiments.

Ramsay, the only child of a civil engineer, was supposed to become a minister, but his interest in science led him to enter the field of organic chemistry, earning a Ph.D. in 1872. Over the next fifteen years, while teaching at universities in Scotland and England, Ramsay synthesized various organic chemicals and studied the critical properties of liquids and gases. After moving to London's University College in 1887, Ramsay became intrigued with a puzzle posed by another British chemist, John William Strutt ( Lord Rayleigh), who had found that nitrogen extracted from the air was a little heavier than nitrogen obtained from chemical compounds.

Ramsay pointed out that...