Your name in lights!  Come on, admit it.  You’ve fantasized about it at least once.  Remember that teacher who doubted you’d ever amount to much?  Didn’t your revenge wish include a scene in which she gazes awestruck at a big billboard upon which just your first name (you’ve become that famous) flashes red-hot against a star-lit sky?  Nothing heals a wounded ego like your name spelled out in bright, glowing tubes of neon light.

The tangles of color and light that are Las Vegas and Times Square have their beginnings, like so many desirable things, in Paris.  In 1910, a clever Parisian named George Claude applied an electrical discharge to a sealed tube of neon gas.  It glowed a bright red-orange. Neon gas always glows red, so any other color is, chemically speaking, not a neon sign.  There are, however, over 150 colors made possible by filling the same glass vacuum tubes with combinations of other gases.  Mercury makes blue, carbon dioxide white, and helium gold.  The addition of phosphors makes all those Miami pastels.

The first public display of Claude’s new technology consisted of two 38-foot tubes at the 1910 Paris Expo.  Soon the firm of Claude Neon was formed, and a Packard dealership owner in Los Angeles bought two of Mr. Claude’s signs for $24,000.  The rest is… well, take a ride down the Las Vegas Strip.

Although he has ceased to drawl “Howdy pardner!” every 15 minutes as he did in his youth, and his mechanical arm may have a touch of arthritis, Vegas Vic, the 60-year-old 75-foot cowboy on Las Vegas’ Fremont Street, is purportedly still the biggest mechanical neon sign ever constructed.

What hath Claude wrought?  Exhortations from “Jesus Saves” to “Eat at Joe’s” have been conveyed in neon and what was once considered eye pollution by many is now chic, collectible and even a fine art medium.  Las Vegas’ Neon Museum has declared its mission to “collect, preserve, study and exhibit neon signs.”  The earliest example in that collection, “Wedding Information” rendered in simple white letters, is from 1940.  In Los Angeles, MONA (Museum of Neon Art) includes vintage signs as well as the work of contemporary artists who use neon.

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