Radon Dorn, Friedrich Ernst

Dorn, Friedrich Ernst (1848-1916) German chemist who discovered the chemically almost inert, but medically dangerous, radioactive gaseous element radon, a noble gas, and showed that it arose as a decay product of radium. 

While studying radium, Friedrich Ernst Dorn (1848—1916) found that it gave off a radioactive gas that, when studied in more detail, proved to be the sixth noble gas. Dorn was given credit for its discovery in 1900. He called it radon, a variation of the word radium. Sir Wdham Ramsay and R. W. Whytlaw-Gray, who also investigated the properties of radon, called it niton from the Latin word nitens, which means shining. Several other scientists who worked with radon named it thoron because of the transmutation of radon-220 from the decay of thorium. However, since 1923, the gas has been known as radon because it is the radioactive decay gas of the element radium. The name is derived from the Latin word radius, which means ray. ... 

Over the next decade, many scientists worked to find out more about radioactive materials. Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie (1859-1906), isolated two new radioactive elements, polonium and radium. In 1900, German physicist Friedrich Ernst Dorn (1848-1916) found a third radioactive element radon. 

German physicist Friedrich Ernst Dorn discovers radon. 

Radon, named after the element radium, was discovered in 1900 by Friedrich Ernst Dorn in Germany. Radon is a radioactive gas found in high concentrations where soil and rocks contain uranium, graphite, shale, or phosphate or where soils may have been contaminated with by-products of uranium or phosphate mining. Some homes were built using sand-like uranium pulverized rock as construction material. 

---