Georges Claude displays his neon lamps to the public at the Paris Expo. Electric advertising is about to take a colorful turn, not to mention quite a few twists.
Claude created his invention by combining an earlier one with a new discovery. German physicist Heinrich Geissler created the first geissler tube in 1855 by applying electricity to a tube filled with gas at low pressure. Then krypton (“hidden gas”), neon (“new gas”), and xenon (“strange gas”) were all discovered in a matter of weeks in 1898 (see here). Around 1902, Claude, an engineer and chemist, started experimenting with neon as the filler gas for a tube. The red color of the light was distinctive. Claude was onto something.
After more tinkering, in 1910 he created two thirty-eight-foot long neon-tube lamps to show to the public. The “liquid fire” was pretty. But business turned out to be pretty slow. It was 1912 before a Paris barber put up the first neon advertising sign. The next year saw a breakthrough, as boulevardiers gazed upon three-and-a-half-foot neon letters spelling CINZANO.
The first city in the United States to get the neon treatment was Los Angeles. (Las Vegas was still a sleepy little desert town.) Earle C. Anthony imported two Packard signs for his LA auto dealership in 1923. Tokyo got its first neon signs in 1926. Neon advertising signs proliferated around the globe. Claude was nearly ninety when he died, in 1960, by which time Las Vegas had started its neon-aggrandized growth.
Neon tubes, strictly speaking, produce only red light. The other colors are produced by combinations of argon, helium, carbon dioxide, mercury, and specialized phosphor coatings on the insides of the tube.
That makes December 11 the brightest red-letter day in the calendar.—RA