Argon's discovery was a triumph of careful measurement over the assumption that air held no surprises: the gap between the weight of atmospheric nitrogen and chemically pure nitrogen was tiny, and pursuing it opened an entire new column of the periodic table. The name argos, the lazy one, captured the property that had hidden it, and set the pattern for naming its inert relatives. Argon has no mythology or alchemical role, being a discovery of the 1890s, but its story carries a quiet moral often drawn from it: that a small anomaly, taken seriously, can reveal a whole family of elements no one had thought to look for.
Rayleigh received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics for the density anomaly that led to argon's discovery, awarded the same year as Ramsay's Chemistry prize for the noble gases as a family, a rare instance of one discovery earning both prizes at once. The German chemist Hugo Erdmann coined the collective term noble gas, Edelgas, in 1898, drawing an explicit analogy to the noble metals such as gold and platinum, which likewise resist reacting with other substances; argon, as the first and most abundant of the family, effectively defined what nobility meant on the periodic table.