There has been a lot of controversy in mountaineering circles recently about the noble gas xenon. As reported in the Financial Times, the Austrian mountaineering company Furtenbach Adventures announced that they will be providing their Everest clients with xenon in the belief that it will help them to climb the mountain safely without having to go through the usual acclimatisation process.
Is it going to work or are Furtenbach Adventures taking a huge risk? Has the announcement given xenon (or Everest for that matter) a bad name? Both of these questions have been discussed widely. There is a good discussion of both the safety and ethical aspects by Alan Arnette and also on ExplorersWeb. The announcement even prompted UIAA, the International Mountaineering Federation, to release a statement saying that they didn’t support its use in this context.
I’m not a scientist, so I’m keeping out of the debate (though as someone who has climbed Everest in the traditional manner, I can say that patience is a virtue in high-altitude mountaineering – there are many benefits to be had in taking things easy and enjoying the whole experience).
As someone who reads a lot of mountaineering literature, I can also say that it’s entirely appropriate that somebody would get around to using xenon, or indeed any noble gas, in mountaineering. This is because the discovery of the first five noble gases, including xenon, has an illustrious association with mountaineering history.
If, like me, you’re not a scientist then you may remember from school chemistry lessons that the noble (or inert) gases occupy the rightmost column of the periodic table. There are six of them: in order of atomic mass, helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon. They are characterised by their tendency not to react when brought into contact with other elements or compounds. Hence the term inert and more tenuously noble (the ability to keep aloof and turn the other cheek when provoked by others is considered a noble trait).
In his article about xenon use on Everest, the journalist Stefan Nestler lists several uses that xenon has. These include lighting, the production of semiconductors, as a satellite propulsion agent, and more famously as an anaesthetic in surgical operations. Xenon also helps the body to produce red blood cells, meaning that it could potentially help mountaineers to acclimatise more quickly.
Most of the noble gases were discovered and isolated in the 1890s by a team led by William Ramsay at University College London’s department of chemistry. Ramsay was eventually awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work (haven’t we all received Nobel prizes).
When Ramsay was appointed Professor of Chemistry at University College London (UCL) in 1887, he invited another chemist Norman Collie to join the team as assistant professor. Unusually for a chemist, Collie was able to blow his own glass and thus make his own chemistry apparatus (imagine if Joe Root made his own cricket bats). But that wasn’t why Ramsay chose him. He also had a brilliant scientific mind and other talents that I will come to in a moment.
The first noble gas to be discovered and isolated was argon. Credit for this is given to Lord Raleigh, a physicist who got one of the other big prizes, the Nobel Prize for Physics, alongside Ramsay in 1904. Raleigh may not have done this without Ramsay’s help. Raleigh discovered that the density of nitrogen when removed from air and separated from oxygen and carbon dioxide, was greater than the density of nitrogen prepared in a lab. He didn’t know why, and it was Ramsay who suggested that there must be another, denser, gas mixed in.
This denser gas turned out to be argon, which constitutes 0.9% of the earth’s atmosphere. It is therefore the most abundant of the noble gases. Work to isolate it from air was done by Ramsay, Collie and the team at UCL. They finally succeeded in 1894; they found that argon refused to react with other elements when heated, or exhibit any other chemical change.
In the course of one of these experiments, Ramsay heated a form of uranium pitchblende to see if it contained argon. He was astounded to discover not only argon but the characteristic spectra of another gas, helium. Helium is the lightest of the noble gases. It was first recorded in 1868 during a solar eclipse; a brilliant yellow layer of incandescent gas was spotted surrounding the sun. Until Ramsay conducted his experiment, nobody had any idea that this gas also existed on earth. Like xenon, helium has many uses, most notably the ability to turn one’s voice into that of Barry Gibb when sucked.
You may be thinking: this is a blog about mountaineering. You started well, but what in the name of Satan’s sausage has any of this got to do with mountains?
I mentioned that Ramsay’s assistant professor Norman Collie had other talents. If you’ve been to the Isle of Skye in Northwest Scotland, then you may well have encountered him, in bronze at least. There is now a statue of Collie and the mountain guide John Mackenzie at Sligachan, the gateway to the Cuillin Hills.
Collie is a Skye legend. A big ostrich of a man with a giant beak of a nose, he first visited Skye with his brother Harry in 1886, a year before he joined Ramsay’s team at UCL. The brothers marvelled at the sight of two mountaineers trying to climb one of the pinnacles of Sgurr nan Gillean. They acquired a rope and made two attempts on Sgurr nan Gillean themselves, but they knew nothing about climbing and eventually gave up. Back at Sligachan, they had a conversation with John Mackenzie, who told them about an easier route around the back. Following this advice, they were able to scramble up Sgurr nan Gillean at the third attempt.
John Mackenzie was already a well-known mountain guide when he met Collie, having assisted the Pilkington brothers to make the first ascent of the Inaccessible Pinnacle (or In Pinn) in 1880. But it was for his friendship with Collie that he’s best remembered. It was a friendship that lasted nearly 50 years until Mackenzie’s death in 1933.
With Mackenzie’s help, Collie set about mapping the Cuillin Hills. They climbed all of the main summits, and Collie measured their heights with an aneroid barometer. They discovered there were 13 peaks over 3,000 feet in height. The In Pinn was believed to be the highest, but when Collie climbed it with Mackenzie, he looked south and thought that Sgurr Alasdair looked higher. Because he was using an aneroid barometer to measure the altitude, which depended on a stable air pressure, they had to go and climb it immediately. This involved traversing above Coire Lagan along the craggy ridge of Sgurr Mhic Choinnich, following slabs around the side of it that are now known as Collie’s Ledge then climbing up and over another peak, Sgurr Thearlaich. It was an exhausting day, but Collie was proved correct: Sgurr Alasdair is indeed the highest mountain on Skye.
On another trip to Coire Lagan, Collie made an intriguing discovery. He took a puzzling photograph which, when developed, revealed a giant shadow across the face of Sron na Ciche, Sgurr Alasdair’s subsidiary ridge. Collie guessed that this shadow must be caused by a giant tower of rock. It was another seven years before he eventually went back to investigate with Mackenzie and discovered the Cioch (which was named by Mackenzie and I’m sorry to say means ‘breast’ in Gaelic).
The Cioch is a giant slab that protrudes from Sron na Ciche about halfway up its face. Accessing its summit involves straddling or crawling along a knife-edge of rock. The Cioch is the setting for a famous sword-fighting scene in the film Highlander. After Collie’s discovery, everyone in Glen Brittle wanted to climb it. Over the next two months Collie and Mackenzie made a further ten ascents leading other people. It is now arguably Skye’s most popular rock climb after the In Pinn, requiring a good head for heights over technical rock-climbing ability.
Collie completed all his exploration of Skye during holidays from his work in the lab. In 1895 Ramsay asked Collie and two other members of the chemistry department, Morris Travers and Alexander Kellas, to help him build up a stock of argon to determine its properties. The Easter holidays were approaching, so Collie took his two companions off to Skye for some team bonding.
Although he accompanied Collie on subsequent trips to Skye and the Alps, Travers wasn’t a natural mountaineer. He was a good researcher, however, and remained on Ramsay’s team throughout the 90s while they ticked off the remaining noble gases.
Kellas, on the other hand, was considered too slow to work with Ramsay. He eventually dropped out of the team and joined Middlesex Hospital as a physiologist. He did, however, take to mountaineering big time, and became as famous in this regard as Collie. He made seven expeditions to the Himalayas between 1907 and 1920. He was one of the first explorers to realise the talents of Sherpas at high-altitude. More importantly, his time at altitude led him to become the world’s leading authority on high-altitude physiology.
In 1911 he climbed 7,128m Pauhunri with three Sherpa companions. Unrecognised at the time, it was actually the highest summit ever reached, and remained a world record until a German-Soviet team climbed 7,134m Pik Lenin in 1928.
Kellas’s mountaineering experience led him to challenge the assumptions of the day, that humans couldn’t survive above 7,200m. He teamed up with another physiologist, J.S. Haldane, to conduct experiments in a lab at the Lister Institute in London. In 1920 he wrote a paper A consideration of the possibility of ascending Mount Everest that concluded it would eventually be possible for humans to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen. It wasn’t until 1978 that Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler proved him right.
He was invited to join the very first expedition to Everest the following year. Tragically, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53 during the trek through Tibet. He was buried in the village of Kampa Dzong.
Long before then, Collie had been involved in his own Himalayan tragedy. Very little was known about climbing at extreme altitudes when he joined the alpinist Albert Mummery in 1895 for the very first attempt to climb an 8,000m peak. They travelled to Pakistan, then part of British India, to attempt 8,125m Nanga Parbat.
Mummery was a risk taker who had made many bold ascents in the the Alps. But he had no appreciation of the enormous scale of Nanga Parbat, or how the reduced oxygen level would affect his performance. Collie eventually convinced him that the Rakhiot Face that they had been attempting was beyond them. He proposed walking around the north side of the mountain to reconnoitre another route. Mummery agreed, but decided to take a shortcut over a high, glaciated pass called the Diamir Gap.
Accompanied by two Gurkha soldiers, Ragobir Thapa and Goman Singh, Mummery left Collie to lead their porters round the easy way, and arranged to meet them in a few days’ time. Neither he nor the Gurkhas were ever seen again. When Collie reached the other side of the pass, he could see that a descent on that side was impossible. It is likely all three died in an avalanche before they even reached the pass.
Mummery’s death meant that Collie returned to UCL halfway through the next term, leaving Ramsay and Travers to carry out lectures in his absence. Upon his return, the three men began the task of working out the properties of helium and argon. But there was another puzzle to solve in the process. Having added the two new elements to the periodic table, they knew that there must be another gas with similar properties to slot between them.
When they diffused the 15 litres of argon that they had laboriously separated from air, they found that it separated into light and heavy constituents. This suggested that there might be another element somewhere in there. Before they liquefied and distilled the rest of their precious argon, they decided to practice by liquefying and distilling air. In the course of examining the dregs of their liquid air, they were astonished to discover another new gas that was too dense to be the one they were looking for. They had discovered krypton, the fourth noble gas, which is denser than argon and sits beneath it in the periodic table.
With their practice round done, they liquefied the rest of their argon in May 1898. When they distilled it and examined the resulting gas with a spectroscope they saw a spectrum of red, orange and yellow lines. It was neon, the noble gas that slotted neatly between helium and argon in the periodic table.
By this time Norman Collie had left the team at UCL and was working for the Pharmaceutical Society. While he is not credited with the discovery of neon, he did claim to have invented the very first neon lamp. In 1908, he was working with a small quantity of neon that Ramsay had leant him from their first experiment. He discovered that if you sealed neon with mercury in a glass tube and shook it, then the neon bubbled with a striking ‘fire-red glow’. It was already known that gases could be made to glow when shaken with mercury, but the brightness obtained from neon far exceeded that of any other gas.
With Norman Collie and Alexander Kellas out of the picture, Morris Travers was the only remaining mountaineer at UCL when the team discovered their last noble gas in July 1898. By repeatedly distilling krypton, they isolated a heavier gas that gave a beautiful blue glow when examined in a vacuum flask.
It was xenon. Has its association with mountaineering turned full circle and come around again? Science nerds should follow the 2025 Everest season with interest.
Further reading. If you want to learn more about the history of the noble gases mixed with an ample dose of mountain travel (and why wouldn’t you?) then I heartily recommend Norman Collie: A life in two worlds by Christine Mill, which has been my main source for this post.
