Fluorine was discovered in the 19th century, with the key breakthrough credited to Henri Moissan, who isolated elemental fluorine in 1886. Moissan developed an electrolytic method to split fluoride compounds in molten salts, using a carefully designed, fluorine-resistant apparatus, and demonstrated that fluorine could be produced as a highly reactive, pale yellow gas. This achievement earned Moissan the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Before Moissan, chemists had long studied fluorine-containing minerals and hydrofluoric acid, with early work dating back to Georgius Agricola’s description of fluorspar in 1529 and Scheele’s production of hydrofluoric acid in the 1770s, but the element itself remained unattainable in pure form until Moissan's electrolytic process.