A short history of the neon sign

The glow on a diner window or a Vegas marquee started in a London lab in 1898. Here's how a rare gas became the most recognizable sign on the American street, nearly disappeared, and came back.

1898: a "new" gas

British chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers found neon in a London lab by slowly boiling off the gases in liquefied air. They named it from the Greek word for "new," and when they ran electricity through it in a glass tube, it lit up a blazing red.

1910: Paris lights up

French engineer Georges Claude worked out how to make neon tubes that lasted, and showed the first neon lights to the public at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910: two red tubes about 40 feet long. He applied for a patent on his long-lasting electrode that same year (the US patent followed in 1915), and that electrode is what made commercial neon signs practical.

1920s to 1950s: America's golden age

Neon reached American streets in the 1920s. A popular story says a Los Angeles Packard dealer, Earle C. Anthony, put up two signs from Claude's company in 1923 and drivers stopped to stare, though historians now question the date. Either way, neon spread fast: theaters, diners, motels and the highway signs of Route 66. By the 1930s and '40s, neon lit main streets across the country.

The quiet years, and the comeback

From the late 1950s and 1960s, cheaper plastic signs lit by fluorescent tubes took over, and fewer and fewer people learned to bend neon. But neon never went away. Starting in the 1970s, artists picked it up, collectors started saving old signs, and today museums across the country restore and display them. New benders are still learning the craft, one bend at a time.

See the old signs in person at a neon museum, or learn to bend your own at a neon school. When you're ready to build, we've been supplying the trade since 1986.