Nearly all of the noble gases were unknown to us until Mendeleev ignited the search for new elements. Three decades later, William Ramsay, Scottish chemist and geek extraordinaire ("The noblest exercise of the mind within doors, and most befitting a person of quality, is study," he once said), succeeded in discovering most of them, with the help of colleagues like Baron Rayleigh.

These gases occasioned the opening lines of Primo Levi's 1975 memoir, The Periodic Table:

There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean "the New," "the Hidden," "the Inactive," and "the Alien." They are indeed so inert, so satisfied with their condition, that they do not interfere in any chemical reaction, do not combine with any other element, and for precisely this reason have gone undetected for centuries. As late as 1962 a diligent chemist after long and ingenious efforts succeeded in forcing the Alien (xenon) to combine fleetingly with extremely avid and lively fluorine, and the feat seemed so extraordinary that he was given a Nobel prize.

(Neil Bartlett was the "diligent chemist" who combined xenon and fluorine. However, Bartlett has not won the Nobel Prize.)