It’s spring! To some, nothing says “warm weather” like “cold beer”—and nothing says “cold beer” like “glowing neon.”
The first neon signs in North America arrived in 1923, when
The signs got their colours from glowing argon (the blue tubes) and neon (the reddish-orange tubes). Both gases were unknown just 30 years earlier.
In the late 18th century English scientist Henry Cavendish discovered that after all the nitrogen and oxygen were removed from a sample of air, a miniscule amount of something else remained. A hundred years later another Englishman, Lord Rayleigh, found that nitrogen extracted from the air had a slightly higher density than nitrogen extracted from ammonia.
Working with William Ramsay, Rayleigh passed “nitrogen” taken from the air over hot magnesium. The magnesium absorbed all the nitrogen, but left behind a gas with about one percent of the original volume. Spectroscopist Sir William Crookes determined this residual gas was something new. Since Rayleigh and Ramsay couldn’t get it to chemically combine with anything, they called it “argon,” from the Greek word for “inactive.”
From its relative density they knew argon made up about 0.934 percent of air. But that still left 0.034 percent unaccounted for.
In 1898 Ramsay, working with Morris William Travers, set out to find what else air might contain. Reasoning that different elements have different boiling points, they allowed liquid argon to slowly evaporate. Sure enough, they discovered a new gaseous element, which they called krypton, from the Greek kryptos, meaning “hidden.”
Then they surrounded solid argon with liquid air and allowed it to evaporate under reduced pressure. When they put the first gas that came off into their atomic spectrometer and heated it, it glowed a brilliant crimson they’d never seen before.
Ramsay’s son Willie suggested naming the gas novum, Latin for “new.” Ramsay decided to stick with Greek, and so called the new gas neon, from the Greek word for “new,” neos. The very next month, working with liquefied krypton, Ramsay and Travers also found xenon, from the Greek word xenos, for “stranger.”
Since the new gases were all inert, they seemed to have little practical use. But all that changed a few years later.
In the 1890s the
In Paris, French inventor Georges Claude, took some
The high voltage applied to the gas in a
Claude displayed the first neon light on December 11, 1910, at the Grand Palais in
In
The signs went up at hotels, department stores, casinos, theatres, car dealerships, dance halls…and especially in bars and liquor stores, as brewers and distributors made available free of charge neon-light wall and window displays advertising their products.
Today there’s even a
Not bad for an inert gas!
