NEON
Characteristics
Neon is a light and very inert gas. Neon remains colorless except when in a vacuum discharge tube, where it glows a reddish orange. Neon isn’t known to be toxic and forms no known stable compounds. Neon, at 2.6 OC, has the smallest liquid range of any element known to man.
Discovery
William Ramsey and Morris Travers discovered neon in 1898. This was not the first element Ramsey had discovered, as he had previously founded argon in 1894. Ramsey then founded helium in 1895. Ramsey and Travers knew there must be an element between argon and helium in the periodic table. After freezing a sample of argon using liquid air and obtained the first gas that came off. Using a vacuum tube to obtain the gas’s spectrum. This was the first time anyone had seen a glow of neon light. Ramsey named the element ‘neon’ which his Greek for ‘new’.
Abundance
The abundance of neon in earths crust is 5 parts per billion by weight, 5 parts per billion by moles. In the solar system the abundance is 1,000 ppm by weight, 70 ppm by moles. The cost of pure neon is approximately $33 per 100g. Neon can be found in the atmosphere and is obtained commercially by fractionally distilling liquid air. Neon has 14 isotopes whose half-lives are known, with mass numbers 16 to 29. Natural neon is a mixture of 3 stable isotopes: 20Ne (90.5%), 21Ne (0.7%), 22Ne (9.2%).
Uses
Neon emits an orange, red light when a few thousand volts are applied to it. Therefore, neon is commonly used in brightly lit