Neil Bartlett has been called "the foremost fluorine chemist in the world" by a colleague, as reported in Chemical and Engineering News. In 1962 he used his skill with that highly active reagent to produce the first-ever compound of a noble gas. Bartlett's success forced a reexamination of basic valence theory, which proposes that the number of free electrons in an atom is the prime factor in determining that atom's bonding behavior.

Bartlett was born September 15, 1932, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, the middle sibling in a family of three children. His father, Norman Bartlett, was a shipwright, a trade plied by the Bartletts for over a century. His mother was Anne Vock Bartlett. After attending Heaton Grammar School from 1944 to 1951, Bartlett entered King's College of the University of Durham, where he received his bachelor of science degree in 1954 and his doctorate in 1958. In 1957 he married Christina Isabel Cross. They have four...