Neon

Neon was discovered in 1898 in London by William Ramsay and Morris Travers, who found it by fractionally distilling liquefied air, one of a family of new inert gases they isolated in quick succession. The name comes from the Greek neos, new; it is often said that Ramsay's thirteen-year-old son suggested the word novum, which his father adjusted to neon. It is the second-lightest noble gas, colourless and odourless, and utterly unreactive, forming no ordinary compounds. Present in the air only in traces and won by distilling liquefied air, neon is used in high-voltage indicator lamps, in certain lasers and cryogenic refrigeration, and most famously in the glowing discharge tubes of illuminated signs, whose intense orange-red light is its signature. Neon was, gram for gram, among the most expensive substances on Earth when Ramsay and Travers first isolated it, since a huge volume of air yields only a trace; a story often repeated holds that it briefly cost more than gold.

Ramsay received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the noble gases as a family, work he carried out with the physicist Travers over a few frantic weeks in 1898 that also yielded krypton and xenon. Despite the modern association with advertising, the largest single use of neon today is not signage at all but the excimer lasers that print circuit patterns onto silicon wafers, with cryogenic cooling a much smaller share, since liquid neon, though costlier than liquid helium, has over forty times its refrigerating capacity per unit volume.

Neon's cultural life is inseparable from its glow. When an electric current is passed through the gas at low pressure it emits an intense red-orange light, a property exploited by Georges Claude, who introduced neon lighting around 1910. The neon sign became a defining image of the twentieth-century city, so that the element's name stands in popular imagination for electric brightness, nightlife and modernity. As a noble gas discovered at the very end of the nineteenth century, neon has no alchemical or mythological tradition; its symbolism is wholly modern, built on the unmistakable colour of its discharge.

Not every glowing tube is literally neon: the vivid range of colours seen in signage comes from different fill gases and coloured or phosphor-coated glass, with pure neon supplying only the reds and oranges, while argon mixed with mercury vapour gives blues, helium gives a peachy white, and other combinations fill out the palette; the whole family is nonetheless known popularly, and inaccurately, as neon signs. The aesthetic became shorthand for a particular vision of the future in twentieth-century popular culture, most famously the rain-slicked, neon-lit streets of the film Blade Runner, and the adjective neon itself entered everyday English simply to mean electrically, artificially vivid, as in neon pink or neon green, a linguistic legacy far outweighing the element's tiny natural abundance.