What makes neon signs glow? A 360° animation - Michael Lipman
When the Hoover Dam was
completed in 1936,
it created a huge source of
hydroelectric power
and zapped a sleepy desert town to life:
Las Vegas, Nevada.
With the power supply from the dam,
Las Vegas soon exploded
with vibrant displays.
The source of these dazzling lights was
electrified neon gas.
There are two tricky obstacles
to making lighted signs
out of this naturally clear,
odorless gas:
capturing it and making it glow.
French inventor Georges Claude came up
with techniques to do both.
In 1902,
he developed a way of liquefying and
separating specific gases from the air,
producing neon on an industrial
scale for the first time.
By 1910, he had come up with a way
to trap the gas in a glass tube
with a special electrode at either end,
and neon lighting was born.
In workshops like Claude's,
artisans known as tube-benders
made neon signs by hand.
The tube-benders heated small sections
of a long, hollow glass tube
and quickly bent them into shape.
After the glass cooled, they attached
electrodes to each end
and removed the air with a vacuum pump.
Then, they passed a high voltage
current through the tube
to remove any impurities on the
inside of the glass.
Finally, they pumped the neon gas in
and sealed off the electrodes.
When a neon sign is turned on,
the electric current causes some of
the neon atoms' electrons to accelerate
and break free of their orbits, leaving
behind positively charged ions.
As these free electrons rush from
one electrode to the other,
they collide with more neon atoms,
causing them to ionize as well.
When these excited electrons fall back
to their normal energy levels,
their excess energy is carried away
by photons, or particles of light.
All this happens in an instant,
and the glow from the photons is what
we see when we switch on a neon sign.
Though it's common to call any
gas-filled sign a "neon" sign,
there are actually 5 different
gases used in production.
Each gas emits photons of a different
wavelength when electrified,
which correspond to different
colors of light.
Neon gives off an orange-red glow, argon
glows a pale lavender,
helium a dusty pink, krypton a silver-
white, and xenon a light purple.
These 5 gases can be combined
with color-coated tubing
to create an electrified rainbow of
text and images.
Business owners soon realized how
effective these colorful beacons
were for attracting customers.
And unlike a light bulb, a neon sign has
no incandescent filaments to burn out,
and can shine continuously for 40 years
before the gas depletes.
By the 1930s, neon signs were lighting
up storefronts all over the world.
Because of the glass tubes'
fragile nature,
it usually wasn't feasible to ship
them over long distances.
Instead, most neon signs were created by
local neon shops
and then installed nearby.
Signs with humor, personality, and
intricate designs proliferated,
no two exactly alike.
But by the end of World War II,
plastics had become widely
available and inexpensive,
and plastic signs supplanted neon
as messengers of modernity.
Many towns removed neon signs they
viewed as old-fashioned.
Today, neon sign production is only
a fraction of what it was at its peak,
but the craft of tube bending lives
on relatively unchanged.
New creations hand-crafted
by local artisans
join survivors from the heyday of neon,
hiding in plain sight in city streets
around the world.
