were not encouraged to seek and accept industrial support.
23 Ramsay had to
earn such monies through ‘private practice’. He could hardly have carried out
his research, much less travelled as widely as he did and established friendships with a vast number of scientific men, without the money earned
through his private practice. It was through this mechanism that Ramsay was
able to recommend people like Richard Abegg to students such as Robert.
There seems no doubt therefore that in Snell’s work Ramsay had spotted ‘a
nice little earner’. Ramsey had apparently ‘made experiments’ himself and
stated in a formal report that;
there is no doubt Snell has proved that gold can profitably be obtained from sea
water on a large scale, and the amount of the gold obtained is so large that
whether the cost of the treatment is £1 a ton or even the outside figure of £8 a
ton, which it could not exceed, it would not make very much difference.
Ramsay was retained by the Industrial and Engineering Trust to develop
Snell’s work. Shareholders included Lord Brassey, Lord Tweedale, the Hon.
Alban Gibbs, several manufacturers and Albert Sandeman, foremost owner of
the Bank of England. The syndicate had the modest capital of £3,000 in £1
shares. Such was Ramsay’s standing that his endorsement even crossed the
Atlantic when on 09 April 1905 the New York Times
36 published an article
roughly calculating the amount of gold available from sea water and declaring
the process as ‘patented’, but ‘bearing a certain resemblance to the treatment
adopted in the mines of the Witwatersrand’. Even some American provincial
papers such as the Minnetonka Record
36 carried the story on 03 March 1905.
The corporation bought property along the English coast to implement the
gold-from-seawater process, but it quickly faded from public view and never
produced any gold. Morris Travers’ biography
29 of Ramsay declined to tarnish his reputation by mentioning this episode, Snell however was undeterred
and in 1905 wrote that he was hoping to ‘submit to the scientific world a far
more wonderful discovery, the process of obtaining gold from the air that we
breathe.’ But the ‘gold-from-seawater’ concept didn’t die with Ramsey and
Snell, it was resurrected by Fritz Haber in the early 1920s in an attempt to
alleviate Germany’s wartime reparations (Chap. 13).
Ramsay’s endorsement of Snell was a foolishness driven by the need to
secure funding for his research, and it led to a degree of embarrassment. But
his later claim that he and his University College colleagues had achieved the
transmutation of one element into another by purely chemical means astonished the scientific world. This of course was the stuff of alchemy and those
such as Rutherford, who did succeed in doing this by physical methods in
1 Robert Le Rossignol
29
23 Ramsay had to
earn such monies through ‘private practice’. He could hardly have carried out
his research, much less travelled as widely as he did and established friendships with a vast number of scientific men, without the money earned
through his private practice. It was through this mechanism that Ramsay was
able to recommend people like Richard Abegg to students such as Robert.
There seems no doubt therefore that in Snell’s work Ramsay had spotted ‘a
nice little earner’. Ramsey had apparently ‘made experiments’ himself and
stated in a formal report that;
there is no doubt Snell has proved that gold can profitably be obtained from sea
water on a large scale, and the amount of the gold obtained is so large that
whether the cost of the treatment is £1 a ton or even the outside figure of £8 a
ton, which it could not exceed, it would not make very much difference.
Ramsay was retained by the Industrial and Engineering Trust to develop
Snell’s work. Shareholders included Lord Brassey, Lord Tweedale, the Hon.
Alban Gibbs, several manufacturers and Albert Sandeman, foremost owner of
the Bank of England. The syndicate had the modest capital of £3,000 in £1
shares. Such was Ramsay’s standing that his endorsement even crossed the
Atlantic when on 09 April 1905 the New York Times
36 published an article
roughly calculating the amount of gold available from sea water and declaring
the process as ‘patented’, but ‘bearing a certain resemblance to the treatment
adopted in the mines of the Witwatersrand’. Even some American provincial
papers such as the Minnetonka Record
36 carried the story on 03 March 1905.
The corporation bought property along the English coast to implement the
gold-from-seawater process, but it quickly faded from public view and never
produced any gold. Morris Travers’ biography
29 of Ramsay declined to tarnish his reputation by mentioning this episode, Snell however was undeterred
and in 1905 wrote that he was hoping to ‘submit to the scientific world a far
more wonderful discovery, the process of obtaining gold from the air that we
breathe.’ But the ‘gold-from-seawater’ concept didn’t die with Ramsey and
Snell, it was resurrected by Fritz Haber in the early 1920s in an attempt to
alleviate Germany’s wartime reparations (Chap. 13).
Ramsay’s endorsement of Snell was a foolishness driven by the need to
secure funding for his research, and it led to a degree of embarrassment. But
his later claim that he and his University College colleagues had achieved the
transmutation of one element into another by purely chemical means astonished the scientific world. This of course was the stuff of alchemy and those
such as Rutherford, who did succeed in doing this by physical methods in
1 Robert Le Rossignol
29