Krypton was found by Sir William Ramsay and Morris Travers in Great Britain in 1898. Ramsay was given the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on noble gases. It was a difficult gas to discover; Ramsay suspected it existed but only found it by removing other gases. This is why he gave it the name Krypton. There is no mineral called Kryptonite or planet called Krypton, which features in the Superman comics by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The fictional planet is probably better known than the real chemical element called Krypton.