History

London, the birthplace of geochronology

Sir William Ramsay (Glasgow, 02/10/1852 - High Wycombe, 23/07/1916) is the father of noble gas geochemistry, having discovered argon, helium, neon, krypton, and xenon in his UCL laboratory, on the same premises as the London Geochronology Centre. In 1904, Ramsay was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the Periodic system".

Ramsay collaborated extensively with John William Strutt (3rd Baron Rayleigh), whose son Robert John Strutt (4th Baron Rayleigh) published the first U-Th-He dates at Imperial College London in 1905.

Strutt's student Arthur Holmes developed the U-Pb method whilst an undergraduate student, assigning an age of 370 Ma to a Devonian rock from Norway. This result was published in 1911, when Holmes was just 23 years old.

Ramsay R.J. Strutt Holmes