Xenon was discovered in England by the Scottish chemist William Ramsay and English chemist Morris Travers in September 1898,[23] shortly after their discovery of the elements krypton and neon

During the 1930s, American engineer Harold Edgerton began exploring strobe light technology for high speed photography. This led him to the invention of the xenon flash lamp in which light is generated by passing brief electric current through a tube filled with xenon gas.

In 1934, Edgerton was able to generate flashes as brief as one microsecond with this method.[14][29][30] In 1939, American physician Albert R. Behnke Jr. began exploring the causes of "drunkenness" in deep-sea divers

Xenon and the other noble gases were for a long time considered to be completely chemically inert and not able to form compounds. However, while teaching at the University of British Columbia, Neil Bartlett discovered that the gas platinum hexafluoride (PtF6) was a powerful oxidizing agent that could oxidize oxygen gas