On December 3, 1910, French physicist and inventor Georges Claude wowed the audience at the Paris Motor Show when he turned on his two 39 foot long neon lights. At this point in time, lightbulbs were still a relatively new addition to the world of illumination. They tended to glow with a faint and warm light not too different from a candle, so when Claude turned on his neon tube, its distinct brilliant red glow would have been unlike anything the exhibition-goers had ever seen before.
Neon tube technology is very simple, and hasn’t changed much at all since Claude’s first lights. What Claude discovered is that if you run an electrical charge through a tube that has been evacuated of air and filled with the inert gas neon, the neon will glow red. He came up with designs calling for solid glass tubes with electrodes at each end, and that simple layout has remained effective over a century later. Claude even postulated, and was sure to patent, that other inert gases would produce different colors. He was correct, of course, and later found that blues, purples, and whites were all achievable using different mixtures of gases.
While Claude’s tube design was revolutionary and unprecedented, neon lighting wouldn’t have taken off as it did were it not for Claude’s innovations in harvesting neon gas itself. Neon had only been discovered a little over a decade earlier by scientists doing experiments on air. They found that neon, along with krypton and argon, two of the other noble gases, are present in air in extremely small quantities. Claude, who had founded a company to produce liquified air, found that one of the byproducts that arose for the air liquefaction process was this elusive odorless neon gas. It was still expensive to produce, but now there was a reliable way of harvesting neon from the air, the only place it exists on Earth.
After showing his new neon tubes to friends and colleagues, it was a publicist associate of Claude’s who immediately grasped the advertising potential. He convinced Claude to reveal his lights at the Motor Show, which turned out to be a prescient notion. Neon quickly caught on in France, before making the jump to America where the colorful glow has come to define the landscapes of American cities. One of the first American neon signs, and one of the most famous among neon enthusiasts, was the 4-foot tall Packard sign erected by automobile magnate Earle C. Anthony in Los Angeles. Since then, neon has grown to become ubiquitous and used by businesses large and small seeking attention through colorful and artistic lighting displays.