The James Logan Courier

By Daniel Brown
San Jose Mercury News (MCT)

Abbott and Costello. Rowan and Martin. Laurel and Hardy.

Here's another great comedy duo: Kwan and Sapp.

The elegant Olympic skater and mouthy Raiders lineman forged an unlikely friendship while taping an episode of "The Simpsons" together in 2004.

From wikipedia:
Sir William Ramsay (October 2, 1852 – July 23, 1916) was a Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 (along with Lord Rayleigh who received the Nobel Prize in Physics that same year for the discovery of argon).

Ramsay was born in Glasgow, the son of William Ramsay, C.E. and Catherine, née Robertson. He was a nephew of the geologist Sir Andrew Ramsay.

He studied at the University of Glasgow under Thomas Anderson and then went to study in Germany at the University of Tübingen with Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig where his doctoral thesis was entitled "Investigations in the Toluic and Nitrotoluic Acids". He returned to Glasgow as Anderson's assistant at the Anderson College. He was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University College of Bristol in 1879 and married Margaret Buchanan in 1881. In the same year he became the Principal of the Bristol and somehow managed to combine that with active research both in organic chemistry and on gases.


Read Sir William Ramsay's 1904 Nobel Prize lecture, free from NobelPrize.org.