48 Fun Facts About Neon

Which element comes straight after neon, at number 11?

Sodium has just one more proton and electron than neon, yet the two could hardly differ more: neon reacts with nothing, while sodium tarnishes within seconds in air and reacts vigorously with water.

What colour does neon glow in a discharge tube?

Reddish-orange is the only colour pure neon gives, so signs in every other shade rely on different gases and glowing tube coatings, and many 'neon' signs contain no neon at all.

Which Asian city, famed for neon-crowded streets, has been stripping out its old signs under a building-safety crackdown?

Hong Kong inspectors began ordering down unauthorised signs that overhang its streets, and many shops swapped the rest for cheaper LEDs; an estimated tens of thousands came down in the decade to 2023.

The name 'neon' comes from a Greek word meaning what?

New is the meaning of the Greek neos: after finding argon, Ramsay expected a lighter gas to be missing from the periodic table, and when the sought-for element finally turned up he named it for exactly that.

Who suggested the idea behind neon's name to its discoverer William Ramsay in 1898?

His young son proposed a Latin name for the freshly isolated gas; Ramsay liked the thought but swapped in the Greek equivalent, and neon it became.

Which two other noble gases did Ramsay and Travers discover in the same year as neon?

Krypton and xenon arrived weeks either side of neon in 1898, and together the finds forced chemists to add a whole extra group to the periodic table, one with no member known for certain a few years earlier.

What did William Ramsay receive in 1904 for discovering the inert gases of the air?

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry capped a change of course: a lecture by Lord Rayleigh in 1894 turned Ramsay to the study of gases, and Rayleigh himself collected the physics prize in the same year.

Neon's co-discoverer Morris Travers moved to Bangalore as the first director of which new institution?

The Indian Institute of Science was the dream of industrialist Jamsetji Tata; Ramsay himself toured India to advise on a site and chose Bangalore, where his old colleague then took charge.

The discovery of neon's two forms led Francis Aston to build which instrument?

The mass spectrograph bent beams of charged atoms with electric and magnetic fields so that lighter ones swerved further; by 1919 it had confirmed neon's two forms, and Aston went on to find isotopes in a large number of other elements.

Which physicist's 1913 experiment with neon ions produced the first evidence of stable isotopes?

J. J. Thomson fired a stream of neon ions through magnetic and electric fields and found it landed in two separate patches on his photographic plate: some of the atoms were heavier than the rest.

What feature of neon's atoms makes the gas so unreactive?

A full outer shell of electrons: eight is the most stable arrangement an atom can have, and other elements form bonds precisely to reach the state neon already enjoys.

Across the universe, which of these elements is even more abundant than neon?

Oxygen ranks third in the cosmos, after the two lightest elements, but neon is not far behind: it comfortably outweighs rock-formers such as silicon and aluminium, however scarce it is on Earth.

Neon makes up only about 18 parts per million of air; which noble gas accounts for nearly 1%?

Argon makes up almost 1% of the air, around 500 times neon's share, yet it stayed hidden until 1894, when a tiny mismatch in the weight of nitrogen taken from air gave it away.

Why is neon scarce on Earth despite being abundant across the universe?

It was too volatile to be trapped: neon stays a gas down to extreme cold and bonds with nothing, so the Sun-warmed dust and rock that built the inner planets could not hold on to it.

How is neon obtained commercially?

Fractional distillation of liquefied air works because neon is so hard to condense: when air is chilled into a liquid, neon is among the few gases left over, ready to be drawn off and purified.

What is liquid neon used for in industry?

A cryogenic refrigerant: litre for litre, liquid neon soaks up over 40 times as much heat as liquid helium, so it is the choice wherever helium's still deeper cold is not needed.

Neon has no value on the Pauling electronegativity scale; which element tops it?

Fluorine heads Pauling's table at 3.98; neon is left blank because the scale is worked out from the energies of chemical bonds, and neon forms none to measure.

Standards laboratories use neon's triple point, where its solid, liquid and gas coexist, to do what?

Calibrate thermometers: neon can be solid, liquid and gas at once only at exactly 24.5561 kelvin, so the International Temperature Scale of 1990 uses that point as one of its fixed reference marks.

Which French engineer demonstrated modern neon tube lighting in December 1910?

Georges Claude's advance was a tube that could be sealed for good: he purified the gas inside so thoroughly that it kept glowing, where earlier discharge lamps needed their gas topped up.

At which event was neon tube lighting first presented in its modern form, in December 1910?

The Paris Motor Show was the launch pad: two huge glowing tubes lit a colonnade of the Grand Palais, an associate of the inventor saw advertising in them, and within about two years the first neon signs were on sale.

Why did the first attempt to sell neon tubes as indoor lighting fail?

Homeowners objected to the colour: the glare nobody wanted in a parlour turned out to be exactly what a shopfront needed, and by 1912 the same tubes were selling as advertising signs.

By long-told tradition, America's first neon signs were bought in the 1920s by a Los Angeles dealer selling which cars?

Packard dealer Earle C. Anthony is the hero of the story, but its date wanders: tellings put his purchase in 1922 or 1923, while aerial photographs of downtown Los Angeles show no Packard neon sign until 1925.

What gave neon lighting's French inventor a near-monopoly on American signs?

A 1915 US patent on the electrode design covered the trick that stopped tubes burning out, so American sign-makers had to buy franchises from his company until it expired in 1932.

What became of neon lighting's French inventor after the Second World War?

He was jailed for collaboration: a vocal supporter of Vichy and the German occupiers, he was sentenced to life in 1945 and stripped of his honours, though he was out again within five years.

Neon lighting's inventor built a 1930 power plant in Cuba that ran on what?

Warm and cold seawater: the plant used the gap in temperature between the sunlit surface and water piped up from the deep to turn a turbine, and it did make electricity before storms wrecked it.

What gas mixture do blue 'neon' signs actually contain?

Argon and mercury vapour give a blue glow rich in ultraviolet, and that invisible light does most of the work: powders coating the inside of the tube soak it up and shine in dozens of other colours.

Roughly what voltage drives the tubes of a neon sign?

10,000 volts or so: a sign's transformer steps mains power up to between 2,000 and 15,000 volts, enough to tear electrons off the gas atoms so the tube conducts and glows, yet the current is tiny, a few hundredths of an amp.

Which writer's 1965 book says Las Vegas's skyline is made 'neither of buildings ... nor of trees ... but signs'?

Tom Wolfe meant it as praise: the signs, he went on, 'soar in shapes before which the existing vocabulary of art history is helpless', in an essay collected in his first book.

What is the outdoor collection of retired Las Vegas signs at the city's sign museum called?

The Boneyard uses the word in its slang sense, a yard where worn-out things are kept: sign-maker YESCO had one full of retired Las Vegas signs, and when it set about clearing the lot in 2000 the city gave the museum land for them.

Before cheap laser diodes, which device relied on red helium-neon lasers?

Barcode scanners: until tiny laser diodes took over, the red line that swept each product at the checkout came from a glass tube of helium and neon, chosen for its steady, precise beam.

Where was the helium-neon laser developed, with the first continuous infrared version demonstrated in December 1960?

Bell Telephone Laboratories built it as the first laser to run on gas and to shine continuously; eighteen months later the same lab coaxed out the visible red beam for which the helium-neon laser is now best known.

By 2020, much of the world's neon was purified in which country, from gas captured at Russian steelworks?

Ukraine took in crude neon captured at Russian steelworks and refined it for export; its two main plants, in Odesa and Mariupol, stopped work when the 2022 invasion began, and buyers had to look elsewhere.

Why did the 2022 neon shortage alarm the electronics industry?

Microchip production relies on it: the lasers that print circuit patterns onto silicon run on gas mixtures containing neon, and it must be refined to a purity only a handful of firms can reach.

In which city did William Ramsay and Morris Travers discover neon in 1898?

London: the pair worked at University College London, where in a single six-week burst in 1898 they isolated three new elements, neon among them.

Which spacecraft's probe found far less neon than expected in Jupiter's upper atmosphere?

Galileo dropped a probe into Jupiter's clouds in 1995, and the missing neon may not have gone far: one explanation is that it dissolves into droplets that rain down towards the planet's interior.

In 2015 NASA reported that its LADEE spacecraft had detected neon in the exosphere of what?

The Moon's neon, suspected since Apollo, arrives on the solar wind, but its atmosphere is about 100 trillion times thinner than ours: far too sparse for the gas to make it glow.

A balloon filled with neon does what in air?

Rises, more slowly than helium: neon's atoms drift about singly, which makes the gas lighter than the paired-up nitrogen and oxygen of the air, but each atom is far heavier than helium's, so the lift is weak.

Only massive stars forge neon by fusing carbon; which of these stars is heavy enough?

Betelgeuse, a red supergiant more than ten times the Sun's mass, is heavy enough to fuse carbon into neon late in its life; lighter stars such as Vega and the Sun stall once they have made carbon and fade into white dwarfs.

Neon is non-toxic, so what is the one real danger if a lot of it leaks into a closed room?

Suffocation: neon does the body no harm in itself, but a big enough leak pushes the oxygen out of a closed space, and with no smell or colour there is nothing to warn anyone inside.

The tiny neon glow lamps once used as power-on indicators were the forerunners of what technology?

Plasma displays are in effect grids of microscopic neon lamps: every pixel is a sealed pocket of gas that a voltage sets glowing, an idea first built in 1964 for a university teaching computer.

Daniel Moore, whose glowing gas tubes lit American shops before neon, began his career working for which inventor?

Thomas Edison reputedly asked what was wrong with his own lamp when Moore began tinkering with tubes of glowing gas. 'Too small, too hot and too red,' Moore is said to have replied, and he soon left to go it alone.

What is the chemical symbol for neon?

Ne follows the letter system the Swedish chemist Berzelius devised in the 1810s to keep track of the dozens of elements he was weighing: one or two letters from each name, and a lone N was already taken.

'Neon' highlighter pens contain no neon at all, so what gives their ink its glow?

Fluorescent dyes soak up invisible ultraviolet light and hand the energy back as visible colour, so the ink gives off light as well as reflecting it; that is why a highlighted page blazes under a black light.

Neon lighting's inventor co-founded which industrial-gas company in 1902?

Air Liquide grew out of a process he devised for making industrial gases in bulk: a schoolfriend rounded up 24 backers to launch the firm, and the rare gases left over from its plants gave him the neon for his first tubes.

Nixie tubes, the neon-filled glass tubes on 1960s scientific instruments, were built to show what?

Numerals: each tube held ten wire digits stacked one behind another, and whichever was switched on lit up in a sheath of glowing neon. Cheaper LEDs eclipsed them in the 1970s, though hobbyists still build them.

Vegas Vic, the 40-foot neon figure who has greeted visitors to downtown Las Vegas since the 1950s, is dressed as what?

A cowboy with a hat, scarf and dangling cigarette, he used to boom a recorded 'Howdy' at the street below, until actor Lee Marvin, in town filming in 1966, complained he was too loud and the casino silenced him.

Designer Douglas Leigh's animated neon 'spectaculars' of the 1930s helped make which place world-famous for its signs?

Times Square got its giant steaming coffee cup and a cigarette billboard that puffed smoke rings from Leigh, an Alabama-born showman of advertising; decades later he was the man who lit up the Empire State Building.

Which city's Neon Museum preserves the glowing shop signs of Cold War-era Poland?

Warsaw owes its collection to a photographer and a graphic designer: after communism fell, the old signs were left to rust, and the pair began rescuing and restoring them one by one before opening the museum in 2012.