So much of our modern world is made of synthetic materials, we often lose our understanding about the nature of things. Not too long ago, the objects we’d grasp were metallic, ceramic, wood, or stone. That was before we were overwhelmed by thousands of different plastics, fiberglass, composite boards, and the like. No wonder we’ve largely given up trying to figure out the makeup of the stage sets in which we conduct our lives.
But what about the true basics? As we seek to understand the cosmos, can we profoundly ignore the nature of earthly materials, such as the air we breathe and the gases that envelop and permeate us? A mere century ago, some of our most brilliant minds embarked on precisely that quest of discovering the nature of our invisible atmosphere, that preamble to extraterrestrial exploring—and found it surprisingly frustrating. Equally amazing is how their discoveries have remained unknown to the vast majority. Come along, let’s step on the gas for a vaporous adventure.
From birth to death we inhale mostly nitrogen. It composes 79 percent of the air. It doesn’t hurt us and it doesn’t help us—some-thing like those Hare Krishna people at airports.
Air’s second component (one fifth of it) is oxygen, high on everyone’s “favorite element” list. It’s the only element people can buy ready-dispensed from machines, in places like Tokyo. Though only the third most prevalent element in the universe, oxygen managed to amass itself like concentrated orange juice—in greatly condensed form—here on Earth, where it has wormed its way into most surface rocks and makes up two thirds of each bit of sand and quartz.
So much for 99 percent of the atmosphere. What’s the other 1 percent of the air we breathe? Put another way, after nitrogen and oxygen, what’s the most common element you have inhaled, non-stop, since the moment you were born?
Guess.
“There are two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance,” said Hippocrates in 440 B.C. A few thousand years later, what most of us don’t know illustrates the poverty of contemporary scholarship: The average citizen is unaware of even such basics as the distance to the moon and the components of air.
Most would guess carbon dioxide, but that’s not an element, and anyway, it accounts for less than one tenth of a percent, despite heavy greenhouse-effect notoriety. We assume carbon dioxide is a major atmospheric player because we’re inclined to pay attention to villains, and CO2 gets unrelentingly bad press. Understandable. Carbon dioxide, which we exhale, is the gaseous equivalent of urine. We don’t want it, and the fact that plants like it only diminishes its status. After all, they enjoy ammonia and horse manure, too. Plants are the dummies of the planet. If they like something, we shouldn’t like it. So, no, carbon dioxide is not the third component of our air, and neither, except in very humid air, is water vapor. Anyway, the latter varies so greatly from place to place and hour to hour, unlike everything else in the atmospheric witches’ brew, that we must ignore water as a reliable component.
Hydrogen? No way. Although there’s four times more hydrogen throughout the universe than everything else combined, you wouldn’t know it from what’s doing here on Earth. Unlike our oddball planet, places more compositionally characteristic of the cosmos (spheres like Saturn, the sun, or the vast, beautiful nebulae) are overwhelmingly hydrogen, and after that you’ll find helium. But not here.
Whatever bits of leftover terrestrial hydrogen didn’t protectively find a secure niche by linking up with other things (as, for example, in the H2O of water or the CH4 of methane) found themselves in a precarious perch high atop the atmosphere. There, random motions caused by sunlight bouncing them around like tennis balls leaked them into space, until by now the drip-drip-drip like a faucet with a cracked washer has reduced the remaining free hydrogen to just minor-bystander status in Earth’s envelope.
Know the correct answer? Not many do. It’s an element discovered only a century ago.
Argon.
Argon is the gas used to fill lightbulbs, so we look at it a lot but think nothing of it. Which is only fair, because argon does nothing to encourage our thinking process, unlike hydrogen and oxygen, the stuff of which nature mostly fashioned our brains.
Argon was discovered by a Scot, William Ramsay, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for his work with gases. He also discovered neon, krypton, and xenon. He even sent electricity through inert gases to produce the brilliantly hued tube lights that now fill our nocturnal hours with nouns such as BEER or short incandescent suggestions such as EAT. Ramsay invented the neon light.
What a simple idea: High voltage would goose the gas trapped in a tube until each atom’s electrons leaped into a higher orbit, which atoms don’t enjoy doing at all. So at the first opportunity (in a fraction of a second), they’d tumble back down again, emitting a “particle” of light of a precise color.
That was just a hundred years ago. Who’s heard of Ramsay today? You’d think someone who’d discovered more of the universe’s ninety-two natural elements than anybody in history and was single-handedly responsible for our culture’s neon surrealism would be remembered at least during the century in which he lived. (Ramsay died in 1916.)
What would he conclude today, if he could survey the few concise words fashioned of his light? He might wonder why its applications came to be so limited despite its widespread use. Why don’t police stations have flashing lights saying TURN YOURSELF IN NOW!? Why don’t we find humorous signs, like pharmacies boasting WE DISPENSE WITH ACCURACY!? Why do the neon boulevards of today’s cities contain so little humor?
There’s also nothing funny about fluorescent lights, which glow by essentially the same process, but with radiant phosphors stuck to the inside of their tubes. The fact that no natural light—not starlight, moonlight, or sunlight, and neither meteors, rainbows, nor lightning—emits light by that process explains why neon and fluorescent lights feel so alien. They are alien. Ordinary incandescent bulbs do mimic the process by which nature emits some of its light. Fluorescent does not. Any wonder a day at school, the office, or the mall feels like a visit to the planet Winderznift?
Also, just for the record, not all “neon” lights contain that gas—only the orange and red ones do. Most of the other colors in so-called neon tubes are produced by colored glass surrounding—you guessed it—argon.
But argon doesn’t have much of a place when it comes to the solid mass of Earth. It’s not a heavy hitter in any other planet’s atmosphere either. The four giant planets boast boring brews of mostly hydrogen compounds, without even the dreary compensation of inert gases for a little variety. Our small sister planets each offer little else but carbon dioxide—crushingly hot and thick on Venus, cold and thin on Mars. It takes 100-mile-per-hour Martian gales to rouse enough oomph out of that skimpy air to raise planet-wide dust storms that periodically reduce that world to an impenetrable mist, erasing all surface features as if our telescope mirrors were suddenly steamed over.
So Martian air reveals its presence, just as all but the single atmosphere-free planet, Mercury, betray the existence of a gaseous shroud, armor against the hard vacuum that extends all the way to the edges of space-time.
But not here. Unlike all the other planets, Earth has an atmosphere with transparent ingredients. True, water vapor often condenses out to form clouds, but clouds are not gaseous, they are droplets of liquid. Water vapor is completely transparent! (The steam from a tea kettle is invisible for the first few inches from the spout. This is the actual steam. Only after it starts condensing into a misty liquid does it get whitish, which leads nearly everyone to assume that steam is white.)
This sometimes-opaque quality of H2O, as well as its “feel” against one’s face on a foggy day, makes people think that steam, fog, or mist is heavier than the rest of the air and makes the floating clouds seem so illogical. But contrary to “common sense,” water vapor is thinner than every other major component of our atmosphere. Dry air is actually much denser than moist air. That’s why airplanes require faster speeds and longer runways to take off in foggy weather: Humid air is thinner, and offers less substance for wings to push against.
The transparency of our atmosphere helps explains argon’s ability to hide from the human mind until a mere century ago, despite permeating our lungs since our original ancestors first inhaled.
Meanwhile, the person responsible for our thoughts about it has vanished from cultural consciousness, his fame no more substantial than the gas within his neon tubes. Let’s salute him now, imagining his name blinking on and off in bright orange like a beer sign: RAMSAY. RAMSAY.