   The Moulin Rouge cabaret in Paris Benoit Tessier/Reuters

The once-ubiquitous form of lighting was novel when it first emerged in the
early 1900s, though it has since come to represent decline.

   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.”

   Workers remove a hammer and sickle from a neon sign that reads “Glory to
   Communism,” visible on the roof of the Communist-run electricity-board
   headquarters in Czechoslovakia in 1989. (AP)

   De Miranda points out that businesses weren’t alone in embracing neon’s
   ability to spread messages effectively. By the middle of the century, the
   lighting was being adopted for more political purposes. “In the 1960s, the
   Soviets deployed a vast ‘neonization’ of the Eastern bloc capitals to
   emulate capitalist metropolises,” de Miranda writes. “Because consumer
   shops were rare in the Polish capital [of Warsaw], they did not hesitate
   to illuminate the façades of public buildings.” In other words, as opposed
   to the sole use of the more obvious forms of propaganda via posters or
   slogans, the mass introduction of neon lighting was a way of getting
   citizens of Communist cities to see their surroundings with the pizzazz
   and nighttime glamour of major Western capitals.

   Neon, around this time, began to be phased out, thanks to cheaper and less
   labor-intensive alternatives. In addition, the global economic downturn of
   the 1970s yielded a landscape in which older, flickering neon signs, which
   perhaps their owners couldn’t afford to fix or replace, came to look like
   symbols of decline. Where such signs were once sophisticated and novel,
   they now seemed dated and even seedy.

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   De Miranda understands this evolution by zooming out and looking at the
   1900s as the “neon century.” The author draws a parallel between the
   physical form of neon lights, which again are essentially containers for
   electrified gases, and that of a glass capsule—suggesting they are a kind
   of message in a bottle from a time before the First World War. “Since
   then, [neon lights] have witnessed all the transformations that have
   created the world we live in,” de Miranda writes. “Today, they sometimes
   seem to maintain a hybrid status, somewhere between junkyards and museums,
   not unlike European capitals themselves.”

   Martin Wartman, a student at Northern Kentucky University, works on a neon
   sign at the Neonworks of Cincinnati workshop connected to the American
   Sign Museum, in 2016. (John Minchillo / AP)

   Another mark of neon’s hybridity: Its obsolescence started just as some
   contemporary artists began using the lights in their sculptures. Bruce
   Nauman’s 1968 work My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the
   Moon poked fun at the space race—another symbol of 20th-century
   technological innovation whose moment has passed. The piece uses blue
   “neon” letters (mercury, actually) to spell out the name “bruce” in
   lowercase cursive, with each character repeated several times as if to
   convey a person speaking slowly in outer space. The British artist Tracey
   Emin has made sculptures that resemble neon Valentine’s Day candies: They
   read as garish and sentimental confections with pink, heart-shaped frames
   that surround blue text fragments. Drawing on the nostalgia-inducing
   quality of neon, the sculptures’ messages are redolent of old-fashioned
   movie dialogue, with titles such as “You Loved Me Like a Distant Star” and
   “The Kiss Was Beautiful.”

   Seeing neon lighting tamed in the context of a gallery display fits
   comfortably with de Miranda’s notion that neon technology is like a time
   capsule from another age. In museums, works of neon art and design coexist
   with objects that were ahead of their own time in years past—a poignant
   fate for a technology that made its name advertising “The World of
   Tomorrow.” Yet today neon is also experiencing a kind of craft revival.
   The fact that it can’t be mass-produced has made its fabrication something
   akin to a cherished artisanal technique. Bars and restaurants hire firms
   such as Let There Be Neon in Manhattan, or the L.A.-based master neon
   artist Lisa Schulte, to create custom signs and works of art. Neon’s story
   even continues to glow from inside museums such as California’s Museum of
   Neon Art and the Neon Museum in Las Vegas. If it can still be a vital
   medium for artists and designers working today, “neonness” need not only
   be trapped in the past. It might also capture the mysterious glow of the
   near future—just as it did a century ago.

   This article originally appeared on The Atlantic.

    About the Author

      Sarah Archer

   Sarah Archer is the author of The Midcentury Kitchen.
