One of the most famous names in the periodic table may have come from a schoolboy. Neon simply means "new," and a 13-year-old is said to have suggested the idea.
In 1898 William Ramsay and Morris Travers were hunting for missing members of a new family of inert gases at University College London. Ramsay had already found argon in 1894 and helium on Earth in 1895. In June 1898 the pair let solid argon evaporate slowly and collected the first gas that boiled off. When they ran a current through it, Travers wrote, "the blaze of crimson light from the tube told its own story."
The naming story is told by the Elementymology reference, which lists Ramsay's 1915 history of the atmospheric gases in its reading. Ramsay's son Willie, then 13, asked what the new gas would be called and suggested Novum, Latin for "new." Ramsay liked the idea but wanted to keep the -on ending of argon. So he used the Greek equivalent, neon, the neuter of neos, "new." The Royal Society of Chemistry tells the same story. Etymonline does not mention the boy, so treat it as the family story it is.
Neon arrived in a cluster. The same year, Ramsay and Travers named krypton, "hidden," and xenon, "stranger." Etymonline notes that these inert-gas names seem to have been handed out somewhat arbitrarily.
The glowing signs came later and made the name famous. The French engineer Georges Claude showed neon tube lighting at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910. His associate Jacques Fonseque saw that the real business was in signs and advertising. Claude patented his electrode design in 1915, and in 1923 his company sold two signs to a Packard dealership in Los Angeles. Etymonline dates neon advertising lights to 1913 and "neon sign" to 1927.
Only the red signs are really neon. Most other colors come from argon, mercury and phosphors, so many "neon" signs contain none at all.
The Greek neos is a distant cousin of English "new," and of Latin novus, the word Willie had in mind.