Fluorine has no mythology, but it has a grim human legend of its own: the so-called fluorine martyrs, the chemists who were poisoned, maimed or killed in the long effort to isolate it. Among them were Humphry Davy, who was injured, the Knox brothers of Ireland, and the Belgian Paulin Louviers and Frenchman Jerome Nickles, whose deaths were attributed to hydrogen fluoride exposure. This history of danger, culminating in Moissan's eventual and cautious success, is the element's true narrative content, standing in for the alchemical or planetary associations that a substance discovered so late simply never acquired.
Andre-Marie Ampere had suspected as early as 1810 that hydrofluoric acid concealed an unknown element akin to chlorine, so the eventual isolation in 1886 closed a gap that had stood open for three quarters of a century. Moissan succeeded only by working at minus 50 degrees Celsius in an apparatus of platinum and iridium, metals resistant enough to survive the gas's ferocity, and even then colleagues initially doubted his results until they were repeated before witnesses. His Nobel Prize, awarded in 1906, cited both the isolation of fluorine and his invention of the electric arc furnace, but he did not live to enjoy the honour long, dying the following year.