Noble Combine

Argon, krypton, xenon, neon, helium and niton are called ''the noble gases" because, like supercilious bluebloods, they disdain to enter into chemical compounds with other substances. As long ago as 1896 noble argon was thought to have been caught in a fleeting intimacy with water, but that and other reported associations of the noble gases were so dubious that chemistry textbooks continue to label the six gases "inert, incapable of forming compounds."

Last week the word was out that the books would have to change their tune, as the result of four years' patient work by bulky, plural-chinned Harold Simmons Booth and his co-workers at Western Reserve University. Early in their experiments it appeared that in boron trifluoride, the boron "accepted electrons" (i. e., was the go-between) in forming compounds with certain other elements. Why not with aristocratic argon?

Dr. Booth's apparatus and methods were intricate. He had to devise a special stopcock-sealing grease that boron trifluoride would not attack, a system of magnetically controlled rods for stirring his mixtures in closed vessels. Every time he generated the trifluoride he washed the maze of tubes, flasks and stills 20 times with air which had been freed of carbon dioxide. Argon 99.9+% was repeatedly distilled for further purification and the boron trifluoride was cleaned until it showed pure in the spectroscope.

If a mixture of gases is cooled under pressure, the freezing point will be raised as the pressure is increased until the mixture becomes a real compound, beyond which point pressure increase has no effect. On this basis, trying different proportions of argon from 1% to 60%, the chemists found six plateaus on their graphs of freezing points which indicated six unstable compounds of argon, containing, respectively, one, two, three, six, eight and 16 molecules of boron trfliuoride.

Ill in bed last week, Dr. Booth croaked jubilantly: "While we were led to the discovery of the argon-fluoride compounds for scientific reasons, we are studying certain possible applications but are not yet ready to discuss them."

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