50 Fun Facts About Neon

What is neon's atomic number?

Its symbol is Ne, and it is the second noble gas after helium.

What colour does neon glow in a discharge tube?

Blue 'neon' tubes actually contain argon and mercury, and phosphor coatings supply the rest of the palette.

Which two chemists discovered neon in London in 1898?

They boiled off liquid air gas by gas over six weeks, finding krypton first, then neon, then xenon.

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

Krypton means 'hidden' and xenon 'stranger'; the name for neon was suggested by Ramsay's son.

Who suggested the name 'neon'?

Travers wrote that 'the blaze of crimson light from the tube told its own story and was a sight to dwell upon and never forget'.

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

Krypton came first, in the same six-week series of experiments; xenon followed in September.

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

His collaborator Lord Rayleigh took the physics prize the same year for their discovery of argon.

Morris Travers, nicknamed 'Rare Gas Travers', later became the founding director of which institution?

He went out to Bangalore on Ramsay's recommendation after teaching at University College, Bristol.

What did Ramsay and Travers mistakenly announce alongside neon as 'metargon'?

It had roughly argon's density but a different spectrum; later spectroscopy exposed the contamination.

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

He saw two patches of light on a photographic plate, showing that some neon atoms were heavier; his device was a crude mass spectrometer.

How many stable isotopes does neon have?

Neon-20 makes up about 90.5%, neon-22 about 9.25% and neon-21 a mere 0.27%.

Where does neon rank in cosmic abundance among the elements?

Only hydrogen, helium, oxygen and carbon are more common in the universe; it is made by fusing carbon in massive stars.

Roughly what fraction of Earth's atmosphere by volume is neon?

That is one part in 55,000, which is why it is far pricier than helium: air is its only source.

Why is neon so rare on Earth despite being abundant in the universe?

Its volatility let it escape the planetesimals that formed the warm inner planets.

How is neon obtained commercially?

About 88,000 pounds of gas mixture must be processed to yield a single pound of pure neon.

Neon is theorised to be what, among all the elements?

It is the only noble gas for which no compound has ever been definitively confirmed.

On the Allen electronegativity scale, which element ranks as the most electronegative?

The familiar Pauling scale cannot rate neon because it relies on bond energies that neon never forms.

Neon's triple point, at about 24.56 kelvin, serves as what?

Liquid neon has over 40 times the refrigerating capacity of liquid helium per unit volume.

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

His firm Air Liquide had been producing neon as a by-product of air liquefaction since 1902.

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

He was sometimes called 'the Edison of France'.

Why did Claude's early attempt to sell neon tubes for home lighting fail?

His associate Jacques Fonsèque switched to advertising signs in 1912 and was instantly more successful.

Which vermouth brand's neon sign lit up the Paris night sky by 1913?

By 1919 the entrance to the Paris Opera was outlined in neon too.

Neon signs reached the United States in 1923 with two signs bought by a dealership selling which cars?

Earle C. Anthony paid $1,250 apiece for the Los Angeles signs, which reportedly stopped traffic.

What gave the French inventor of neon lighting a near-monopoly on US signs until the early 1930s?

His company Claude Neon Lights sold franchises to sign-makers across the country.

What happened to the inventor of neon lighting after the Second World War?

He was stripped of his honours in 1945; earlier he had built the first ocean thermal energy plant, in Cuba.

Where did the inventor of neon lighting build the first prototype ocean thermal energy plant in 1930?

It generated 22 kilowatts; a second plant in 1935 was mounted on a cargo ship.

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

The mixture emits ultraviolet light, which makes fluorescent phosphor coatings glow in many colours.

Roughly what voltage do neon signs operate at?

Tiny neon glow lamps, by contrast, run at 100–250 volts and were the forerunners of plasma screens.

Who wrote in 1965 that Las Vegas's skyline is made 'neither of buildings... nor of trees... but signs'?

By 1940 there were nearly 2,000 small neon shops in America and Times Square blazed with Douglas Leigh's designs.

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

The museum's visitor centre is the rescued lobby of the La Concha Motel, and it opened fully in 2012.

The classic red He-Ne laser emits at what wavelength?

Before cheap diode lasers, He-Ne lasers read barcodes at supermarket checkouts.

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

The visible red version followed there 18 months later in 1962.

Before 2022, roughly what share of the world's neon supply came from Ukraine?

It was a by-product of Russian steel-making, purified by firms in Odesa and Mariupol.

Why did the 2022 neon shortage worry the electronics industry in particular?

Prices had already jumped about 600% after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

By what factor did neon prices jump after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014?

Chipmakers began shifting to Chinese suppliers as a result.

Which spacecraft found neon depleted by about a factor of ten in Jupiter's upper atmosphere?

The finding suggests the icy planetesimals that fed Jupiter formed somewhere too warm to hold on to neon.

In 2015 NASA's LADEE spacecraft detected neon in the exosphere of what?

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer confirmed the long-suspected presence.

A balloon filled with neon does what in air?

Monatomic neon is lighter than the diatomic nitrogen and oxygen that make up most of the atmosphere.

Neon-20, the main isotope, is made in stars by fusing which element with itself?

The carbon-burning process needs temperatures above 500 million kelvin, found only in stars over eight solar masses.

Which noble gas is directly above neon in the periodic table?

Group 18 runs helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, radon and, arguably, oganesson.

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

LEDs have now displaced them as indicators, though they survive in high-voltage circuits.

Neon-based signage was preceded by 'Moore tubes', which used electric discharges in which gas?

Daniel McFarlan Moore commercialised them in the early 1900s, before neon was available in quantity.

What is the chemical symbol for neon?

It is the second noble gas in the periodic table and is a colourless, odourless, monatomic gas with about two-thirds the density of air.

Roughly what is neon's density compared with air?

Being monatomic, neon is lighter than diatomic nitrogen and oxygen, so a neon balloon rises in air.

What is the approximate natural abundance of neon's main isotope, neon-20?

Neon-20 makes up 90.48% of natural neon, with neon-22 at 9.25% and neon-21 a mere 0.27%.

Which company, founded by Georges Claude, produced industrial neon as an air-liquefaction byproduct?

After 1902 the firm turned out neon in quantity, which is what made Claude's 1910 lighting demonstration possible.

How long were the two red neon tubes Claude showed at the 1910 Paris Motor Show?

They lit a peristyle of the Grand Palais from 3 to 18 December 1910; his associate Jacques Fonsèque then saw the potential for advertising signs.

How much did Earle C. Anthony pay for each of the two 'Packard' neon signs he bought in 1923?

The Los Angeles signs, dubbed 'liquid fire', were visible in daylight and people would stop in the street to stare at them.

Which designer created many of the famous neon installations in New York's Times Square?

By 1940 there were nearly 2,000 small shops producing neon signs in the United States, where the craft peaked between the 1920s and 1950s.

Perhaps the oldest US neon sign still in original use, reading 'Theatre', dates from 1929 and hangs in which state?

It belongs to the Lake Worth Playhouse in Lake Worth Beach, Florida.