Neon Trivia
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48 free Neon trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Neon trivia covers the gas that gave us the neon sign and rather more besides. Element number 10 was discovered in London in June 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris Travers, who boiled liquid air and watched a tube blaze crimson; Ramsay's son suggested the name, from the Greek for 'new'. It is the fifth most abundant element in the universe and yet so rare on Earth that a pound of it takes 88,000 pounds of processed gas to make. This quiz runs from the chemistry (the noble gases, the three stable isotopes J. J. Thomson stumbled on in 1913, the element with no confirmed compounds, the triple point that anchors a temperature scale) to the culture: Georges Claude's demonstration at the 1910 Paris Motor Show, the Cinzano sign over Paris, the two Packard signs that stopped traffic in Los Angeles, why 'neon' blue tubes are actually argon and mercury, the red line of the helium-neon laser, Las Vegas and its Neon Boneyard, and the 2022 shortage that reminded chipmakers that most of the world's neon came from Odesa. Easy questions suit anyone who remembers the periodic table; the expert tier is for chemists and sign-benders. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on neon, neon lighting and their discoverers, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which element comes straight after neon, at number 11?
Sodium
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.
Q 02What colour does neon glow in a discharge tube?
Reddish-orange
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.
Q 03Which Asian city, famed for neon-crowded streets, has been stripping out its old signs under a building-safety crackdown?
Hong Kong
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.
Q 04The name 'neon' comes from a Greek word meaning what?
New
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.
Q 05Who suggested the idea behind neon's name to its discoverer William Ramsay in 1898?
His young son
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.
Q 06Which two other noble gases did Ramsay and Travers discover in the same year as neon?
Krypton and xenon
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.
Q 07What did William Ramsay receive in 1904 for discovering the inert gases of the air?
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry
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.
Q 08Neon's co-discoverer Morris Travers moved to Bangalore as the first director of which new institution?
The Indian Institute of Science
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.
Q 09The discovery of neon's two forms led Francis Aston to build which instrument?
The mass spectrograph
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.
Q 10Which physicist's 1913 experiment with neon ions produced the first evidence of stable isotopes?
J. J. Thomson
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.
Q 11What feature of neon's atoms makes the gas so unreactive?
A full outer shell of electrons
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.
Q 12Across the universe, which of these elements is even more abundant than neon?
Oxygen
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.
Q 13Neon makes up only about 18 parts per million of air; which noble gas accounts for nearly 1%?
Argon
Q 21Why did the first attempt to sell neon tubes as indoor lighting fail?
Homeowners objected to the colour
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.
Q 22By long-told tradition, America's first neon signs were bought in the 1920s by a Los Angeles dealer selling which cars?
Packard
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.
Q 23What gave neon lighting's French inventor a near-monopoly on American signs?
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.
Q 14Why is neon scarce on Earth despite being abundant across the universe?
It was too volatile to be trapped
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.
Q 15How is neon obtained commercially?
Fractional distillation of liquefied air
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.
Q 16What is liquid neon used for in industry?
A cryogenic refrigerant
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.
Q 17Neon has no value on the Pauling electronegativity scale; which element tops it?
Fluorine
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.
Q 18Standards laboratories use neon's triple point, where its solid, liquid and gas coexist, to do what?
Calibrate thermometers
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.
Q 19Which French engineer demonstrated modern neon tube lighting in December 1910?
Georges Claude
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.
Q 20At which event was neon tube lighting first presented in its modern form, in December 1910?
The Paris Motor Show
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.
A 1915 US patent on the electrode design
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.
Q 24What became of neon lighting's French inventor after the Second World War?
He was jailed for collaboration
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.
Q 25Neon lighting's inventor built a 1930 power plant in Cuba that ran on what?
Warm and cold seawater
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.
Q 26What gas mixture do blue 'neon' signs actually contain?
Argon and mercury
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.
Q 27Roughly what voltage drives the tubes of a neon sign?
10,000 volts
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.
Q 28Which writer's 1965 book says Las Vegas's skyline is made 'neither of buildings ... nor of trees ... but signs'?
Tom Wolfe
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.
Q 29What is the outdoor collection of retired Las Vegas signs at the city's sign museum called?
The Boneyard
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.
Q 30Before cheap laser diodes, which device relied on red helium-neon lasers?
Barcode scanners
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.