Page 320 - Arrow Pushing in Inorganic Chemistry A Logical Approach to the Chemistry of the Main Group Elements

8

The Noble Gases

Because my co-workers at that time (March 23, 1962)
were still not sufficiently experienced to help me with
the glassblowing and the preparation and purification
of PtF [platinum hexafluoride] necessary for the
6
experiment, I was not ready to carry it out until
about 7 p.m. on that Friday. When I broke the seal
between the red PtF gas and the colorless xenon gas,
6
there was an immediate interaction, causing an
orange-yellow solid to precipitate. At once I tried to
find someone with whom to share the exciting finding,
but it appeared that everyone had left for dinner!
Neil Bartlett in Fluorine Chemistry,
at the Millennium Banks, R. E. ed.;
Elsevier: Amsterdam, 2000, p. 39.

The majority of the noble gases were discovered in the nineteenth century. The discovery
that the noble gases are not entirely inert happened in more recent memory, in 1962, and is
now part of chemistry’s lore. Working alone at the University of British Columbia in Van-
couver, Canada, British chemist Neil Bartlett (1932–2008) discovered that the high-valent
−
+
compound PtF could oxidize molecular oxygen to O PtF . Since xenon has the same
6 2 6
ionization potential as O , he reasoned that xenon should also form a similar compound
2
with PtF , a prediction that proved essentially correct. Figure 8.1 presents a reproduction
6
of Bartlett’s paper, one of the shortest in the history of science for a major discovery. Sub-
sequently, the product was shown to be a bit more complex; it was apparently a mixture of
[XeF][PtF ] and [XeF][Pt F ]. In the last 50 years since that historic finding, xenon chem-
6 2 11
istry has grown by leaps and bounds, and a few compounds have also been synthesized for
krypton and radon.

Arrow Pushing in Inorganic Chemistry: A Logical Approach to the Chemistry of the Main-Group Elements,
First Edition. Abhik Ghosh and Steffen Berg.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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