Searching for Signs of Neon

In his enjoyable book The Periodic Kingdom, P.W Atkins describes the Periodic Table as a land of mountains, valleys, lakes, and shores. The noble gases are termed a strip of land on the eastern shore and Atkins notes that .. . no other complete strip of land of the kingdom owes so much to a single person —Ramsay. 

Lord Rayleigh and Professor William Ramsay, Argon, A New Constituent of the Atmosphere, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1896. 

The Norton History of Chemistry, Norton, New York, 1993, pp. 331—340. This is an especially enjoyable and accessible discussion. 

Special Newsday reproduction of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Vol. 60, No. 360, Sunday, December 30,1900. 

Not to be too curmudgeonly about it, but note that in Brooklyn at least, the end of the century was properly celebrated and not snuck in at the end of 1899—mathematical authority still held sway over Madison Avenue if the latter indeed existed. 

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