Oxford, England/oxford982
Previous | Home | NextContinuation of Moseley's biographical sketch. Moseley's work was consistent with previous conclusions that the relative ranking of tellurium and iodine, and of potassium and argon, were the reverse of their relative atomic weights. (It had long been suspected, beginning with Mendeleev, that iodine should be placed above tellurium in spite of its lower atomic weight, to give a chemical consistent halogen family in the Periodic Table. With Ramsay's later discovery of argon it was obvious that argon should be placed below potassium in spite of its higher atomic weight ). Furthermore, now Moseley could definitely state that there were exactly 92 elements ranging from hydrogen to uranium. He could predict which elements were yet to be discovered! Georges Urbain of Paris {LINK: Paris}visited Moseley in Oxford (May, 1914) with the explicit purpose of confirming his discovery of "celtium," which he thought was a new rare earth element. In a matter of only minutes, Moseley analyzed a mixture that would take years by the classical methods which were particularly so inefficient for the very similar rare earths. Moseley demonstrated that Urbain's celtium was in fact a mixture of two other rare earths, already known.
