In the summer of 1898, the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay made a discovery that would eventually give the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the Las Vegas Strip, and New York's Times Square their perpetual nighttime glow. Using the boiling point of argon as a reference point, Ramsay and his colleague Morris W. Travers isolated three more noble gases and gave them evocative Greek names: neon, krypton, and xenon. In so doing, the scientists bestowed a label of permanent novelty on the most famous of the trio—neon, which translates as “new.” This discovery was the foundation on which the French engineer Georges Claude crafted a new form of illumination over the next decade. He designed glass tubes in which neon gas could be trapped, then electrified, to create a light that glowed reliably for more than 1,000 hours.
In the 2012 book L'être et le Néon, which has been newly translated into English by Michael Wells, the philosopher Luis de Miranda weaves a history of neon lighting as both artifact and metaphor. Being and Neonness, as the book is called in its English edition, isn't a typical material history. There are no photographs. Even de Miranda's own example of a neon deli sign spotted in Paris is re-created typographically, with text in all caps and dashes forming the border of the sign, as one might attempt on Twitter. Fans of Miami Beach's restored Art Deco hotels and California's bowling alleys might be disappointed by the lack of glossy historical images. Nonetheless, de Miranda makes a convincing case for neon as a symbol of the grand modern ambitions of the 20th century.
De Miranda beautifully evokes the notion of neon lighting as an icon of the 1900s in his introduction: “When we hear the word neon, an image pops into our heads: a combination of light, colors, symbols, and glass. This image is itself a mood. It carries an atmosphere. It speaks … of the essence of cities, of the poetry of nights, of the 20th century.” When neon lights debuted in Europe, they seemed dazzlingly futuristic. But their husky physicality started becoming obsolete by the 1960s, thanks in part to the widespread use of plastic for fluorescent signs. Neon signs exist today, though they've been eclipsed by newer technologies such as digital billboards, and they remain charmingly analog: Signs must be made by hand because there's no cost-effective way to mass-produce them.
In the 1910s, neon started being used for cosmopolitan flash in Paris at precisely the time and place where the first great modernist works were being created. De Miranda's recounting of the ingenuity emerging from the French capital a century ago is thrilling to contemplate: the cubist art of Pablo Picasso, the radically deconstructed fashions of Coco Chanel, the stream-of-consciousness poetry of Gertrude Stein, and the genre-defying music of Claude Debussy—all of which heralded a new age of culture for Europe and for the world.
Amid this artistic groundswell, Georges Claude premiered his neon lights at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910, captivating visitors with 40-foot-tall tubes affixed to the building's exterior. The lights shone orange-red because neon, by itself, produces that color. Neon lighting is a catchall term that describes the technology of glass tubing that contains gas or chemicals that glow when electrified. For example, neon fabricators use carbon dioxide to make white, and mercury to make blue. Claude acknowledged at the time that neon didn't produce the ideal color for a standard light bulb and insisted that it posed no commercial threat to incandescent bulbs.
Of course, the very quality that made neon fixtures a poor choice for interior lighting made them perfect for signs, de Miranda notes. The first of the neon signs was switched on in 1912, advertising a barbershop on Paris's Boulevard Montmartre, and eventually they were adopted by cinemas and nightclubs. While Claude had a monopoly on neon lighting throughout the 1920s, the leaking of trade secrets and the expiration of a series of patents broke his hold on the rapidly expanding technology.
In the following decades, neon's nonstop glow and vibrant colors turned ordinary buildings and surfaces into 24/7 billboards for businesses, large and small, that wanted to convey a sense of always being open. The first examples of neon in the United States debuted in Los Angeles, where the Packard Motor Car Company commissioned two large blue-and-orange packard signs that literally stopped traffic because they distracted motorists. The lighting also featured heavily at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. At the latter event, a massive neon sign reading futurama lit the way to a General Motors exhibition that heralded “The World of Tomorrow.”
