Glenn Powell, age 12, of Dallas, Tex  ,

Many minerals and metals were known and put to use before the dawn of history  The people of ancient Crete marveled at the strange properties of the magnet  Around 200 B  C,, Archimedes of Greece discovered how to test metals by specific gravity  The early chemists learned a lot about solids and liquids  Hut they thought that the air was an element, fixed and unchanging 

The alchemists of the Middle Ages hoped to turn lead into gold and one of these experimenters made the first discovery of a gas by accident  Ha was Jean Baptists van Helmont of Belgium  He noted a certain gas ‑    He noted a certain gas ‑  coming from burning and fermenting substances and named it sylvestre

The French scientist Lavoisier later determined its properties  This gas, which we call carbon dioxide, was first discovered late in the 16th century,

No one thought much more about the air until the 18th century  Than came an exciting time in the world of chemistry  In London, Sir Henry Cavendish was experimenting with electricity, gases and the composition of water  John Dalton was setting forth his atomic theory and using it to explain chemical reactions  This was a time of probing and exploring things which had long been taken for granted 

Nitrogen was discovered by the Scottish chemist Daniel Rutherford in the year 1772  In 1774, oxygen was discovered independently by Joseph Priestly in England and Karl Scheele in Sweden  Cavendish then showed that the composition of ordinary air was mostly nitrogen and about 21 per cent oxygen 

There the matter rested for the next 100 years  The five rare gases that make up the remaining one per cent of the air were discovered in the last few gears of the last century 

Most of the work was done by the English scientist  Sir William Ramsey 

However,  he had a helping hand from a solar eclipse 

The eclipse took place in India in the year 1868 and certain spectograph photographs taken at the time caused a lot of excitement  A spectograph picture shows bands of rainbow colors and from them the scientists can identify the burning elements which mach them  In these eclipse pictures, there were bandy of bright yellow identified as a new element known to exist only on the sun, It was named helium from the Greek word for the sumo

Ramsey discovered the rare gas argon in the air in 189, The name he gave it, means the lazy one  Argon is a very inert gas, refusing to combine or become active with other elements  In the same day he found traces of the sun gas helium in the earth’s air, In 1898, Ramsey identified and  named three more of the air's rare gases  He found neon, whose name means the new one, krypton, whose name means the hidden one and radon which means the stranger  In 1904, Ramsey was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of these rare gases which occur in ordinary air