Miniature neon lamp

The miniature neon lamp emerged when three separate technological streams converged at exactly the right moment. Daniel McFarlan Moore, working at General Electric in 1917, recognized what had become possible only because specific precursor technologies now existed simultaneously.

When William Ramsay and Morris Travers discovered neon in 1898, they noticed its brilliant red glow under electrical excitation. But neon remained a laboratory curiosity until Georges Claude figured out how to produce it industrially. Claude's air liquefaction business, L'Air Liquide (founded 1902), generated neon as a byproduct. By December 1910, Claude had demonstrated large neon tube lighting at the Paris Motor Show. Moore himself had pioneered commercial gas discharge lighting with his "Moore tubes"—nitrogen and CO2-filled lamps that predated neon. When he joined GE around 1912, he brought accumulated gas discharge expertise into sophisticated manufacturing.

By 1917, lamp manufacturers had developed techniques for creating sealed glass envelopes with electrodes, evacuating them to high vacuum, and controlling gas pressures precisely. Irving Langmuir's 1915 diffusion pump enabled true high-vacuum work. Moore's insight: miniaturize large neon tubes into small capsules with electrodes very close together. The result used "coronal discharge" rather than arc discharge—it glowed rather than sparked.

Starting in the 1930s, manufacturers built voltage regulator tubes using the lamp's negative resistance characteristic. Engineers built logic circuits, flip-flops, and ring counters from neon lamps. The NE-2 became ubiquitous in instrument panels. By the 1950s, the Nixie tube—the miniature neon lamp's descendant—was displaying numbers in the first electronic calculators.