Neon lighting

By 1910, cities had electricity but lacked spectacle. Incandescent bulbs were workhorses, not showstoppers. Meanwhile, Georges Claude's French company L'Air Liquide was producing 10,000 cubic meters of liquefied air daily for the steel industry—and discarding mountains of neon gas as worthless byproduct. The pieces were in place.

In 1898, Scottish chemist William Ramsay and Morris Travers discovered neon through fractional distillation of liquefied air at University College London. When they passed electric current through isolated gas, it produced brilliant reddish-orange glow. They named it from Greek "neos" (new). Claude co-founded L'Air Liquide in 1902; the process yielded neon as unwanted residue.

Claude solved two critical problems. First, purification methods to isolate ultra-pure neon. Second—crucially—electrodes that minimized "sputtering" degradation from heat, adding carbon filters to trap impurities. His tubes could glow continuously for 1,200 hours at lengths up to 20 feet. Previous attempts failed within hours.

On December 3, 1910, at the Paris Motor Show, Claude mounted two 40-foot neon tubes on the Grand Palais colonnade. The tubes glowed vivid orange-red, visible across the city. Claude patented his electrode design and received a U.S. patent in 1915 anchoring his American monopoly through the early 1930s.

In 1922, Earle Anthony purchased two "Packard" signs for his Los Angeles dealership. Traffic jams formed as drivers stared at the hypnotic glow. Newspapers called it "liquid fire." By 1924, Times Square had its first neon. By 1940, nearly every American downtown blazed.

Las Vegas found its identity in neon. Tom Wolfe observed in 1965: "Las Vegas is the only city whose skyline is made neither of buildings nor trees, but signs." The technology that once meant "future" now means "past worth preserving"—museums preserve historic signage as art, while retro neon aesthetic saturates contemporary design.