An Atom Spin Around Electron on Neon Art Display in California

Nosotros've seen them glowing on New York Urban center theater billboards, Las Vegas casinos and Hong Kong high-rises. They cast unbidden light and shadow into restaurants and homes and are a office of the daily scenery for millions. But neon signs, once a vital function of a city's civilization and barometer for its economic climate, are fading out of sight as the once-popular engineering science disappears from the streets.

An online exhibition tells the story of neon's history, which began purely by accident.

When the British chemist William Ramsay was first trying to identify the chemical element neon, a noble gas he discovered in 1898, he enclosed information technology in a container and practical electricity. A "blaze of crimson" came from the container — the showtime sparks of a new manufacture.

Each neon sign is unique, and many are at risk equally they are taken down and replaced with depression-toll alternatives. Photo past Jimmy Ming Shum, courtesy of M+ Museum

Now, neon has get a symbol of capitalism, business and the economic climate that surrounds information technology. But lower-cost alternatives are replacing information technology, especially in Hong Kong, where thousands of signs are being taken down. Hong Kong's M+ Museum has begun building a permanent collection of these signs and created an online exhibition where users can check out a map of signs effectually Hong Kong along with essays on the signs' cultural significance.

First, a primer on how they work: to make the signs, craftspeople curve tubes of heated drinking glass into a desired shape. The drinking glass is filled with a combination of gases that respond to electricity by emitting lite; "neon" has go industry shorthand for the effect that these gases produce. Electrical leads are embedded to each end, and when a voltage is applied, it excites electrons in the gases' atoms — causing a glow.

The process of neon glass angle is featured in "The Making of Neon Signs," a video produced for "Mobile One thousand+: NEONSIGNS.HK." Photo and caption courtesy of M+ Museum

French engineer Georges Claude created the offset neon lamp in 1902, and in 1910 displayed his invention publicly for the first time at the Paris Motor Show. In 1912, Claude created what many believe to exist the first neon advertising: the words "PALAIS COIFFEUR," which lit upwards xiv boulevard Montmartre in Paris. By 1914, more than than 100 businesses in Paris followed suit, attracting attention to their storefronts with neon. Claude was awarded a U.Southward. patent for the neon calorie-free in 1915 and began selling licenses to others who wanted to produce them.

Neon did not come up to the U.S. until 1923, when the Roaring 20s were underway and the automotive manufacture was booming. Claude sold a pair of neon signs to a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles, which stopped traffic among onlookers who reportedly called the light "liquid burn down." The U.South. automobile industry had new visual shorthand for the consumerism that drove it.

"I retrieve people really respond to neon," said Kevin Adams, a theatrical lighting designer who used neon-imitating LEDs in a design for the Metropolitan Opera's production of "Rigoletto" in 2013. "At that place's a kind of cool gene related to it that people respond to."

Running across the unabridged width of its façade, the Victory Mahjong neon sign in Yau Ma Tei offers an architectural expression of animated "running neons." Photo by Jimmy Ming Shum. Photo and caption courtesy of Chiliad+ Museum

Wherever the signs are used, they are a visual hallmark of consumerist city culture, said Lawrence Pun, a cultural critic living in Hong Kong. "The visual stimulus of the neon sign seems to reverberate the prosperity that fuels urbanites' desires," Pun wrote in an essay for the Yard+ Museum exhibit. "Capitalist club is predicated on city dwellers' desire to consume."

This prosperity was apparent in a 1929 description of New York City's neon lights from the newspaper "Brooklyn Life and Activities of Long Island Society," published roughly three months before the stock market crashed:

From the corner of Broadway and Twoscore-second Street, where the bright-lite district begins, the view at night is a vast panorama of color blood-red squares and rectangles enclosing green letterings and blueish-purplish lines providing a setting for yellow flashes and orange bolts of electric lighting. Looking to the eastward, deep red is easily the favorite. Reddish lights proclaim the wares of radio stores, restaurants, drug stores and a merchandiser of sporting goods.

In the 1930s, fifty-fifty as the Great Low plunged the U.S. economy into crunch, neon swept through the country, with Times Square becoming its neon epicenter. Meanwhile, Hong Kong's first neon shop opened in 1932, and neon signs gained popularity in Hong Kong during the 1930s and in the postwar era.

Dating to 1976, the Kai Kee Mahjong neon rooster in Kwun Tong once overlooked Yue Human being Foursquare. Redevelopment of the expanse prompted its removal, and it was donated by Kai Kee to the Chiliad+ collection. Photo and caption courtesy of M+ Museum

As a medium that first gained a foothold in advertising, the ascension of neon, and eventually its decline, are strongly associated with consumer wealth and economic class. Its early employ for automotive advertising links information technology to the industry that President Barack Obama recently credited with having "built the middle class in this country." At the time they first appeared in the 1920s, neon signs were a sign of strong business.

But neon gradually became associated with lower classes. While businesses began to replace neon signs in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the businesses that retained them were working-class establishments — mostly "cheap, rather run-down bars, hotels and restaurants that could not afford brand-new advertising displays," co-ordinate to the volume "Flickering Lite: A History of Neon."

A human being stands in the lite of the neon sign at Paris Cotton Singlets Co. Ltd, 15 Pak Sha Road, Causeway Bay. "We've been here since 1971, and our neon sign has been with united states the whole time. Now the sign is getting old; no one is willing to set it. Only we're however very proud of it," he said. Photo by Wing Shya. Photograph and caption courtesy of M+ Museum

In Hong Kong, neon signs at present mostly announced outside independent businesses as global corporations phase them out, co-ordinate to Christoph Ribbat, a Professor of American Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany. But as even those are taken down and replaced past LEDs, fluorescent tubes and other alternatives, locals ask what is being lost.

Since 1977, the Sammy'due south Kitchen neon cow has presided over Queen's Road W in Sai Ying Pun. Due to its size, the owners were ordered to dismantle
the sign, and it will later enter the K+ permanent drove. Photo and caption courtesy of M+ Museum

One of Hong Kong's iconic signs, the neon cow that appeared outside of Sammy'south Kitchen for over 35 years, was taken down this month later on the Hong Kong Buildings Department ruled information technology illegal. The M+ Museum volition larn that sign.

Sammy Yip, who owns Sammy's Kitchen, told the South China Morning time Post he was glad it would observe a new dwelling house in the museum. "At least I can become there and have a look at it from time to time," he said. "I have deep emotional zipper to this neon cow."

In the 1970s, the Millie'due south Centre anchored the corner of Nathan and Jordan Roads. Photo by Dusty Sprengnagel. Photo and caption courtesy of Yard+ Museum

Lower-cost alternatives tin can mimic neon, just its brightness and vivid colors are difficult to fully reproduce, co-ordinate to Adams. "There's just nothing else like it," he said. "The colors that neon tin make, yous can't reproduce with other products — the deep purples and ambers and yellows."

Today, the storefront that first displayed a neon sign in Paris has become a Hard Rock Café, the American theme restaurant whose make rests on nostalgic rock-and-roll memorabilia and neon.

Many cities still have neon artists producing signs, Adams said. But he questioned how many people will know the departure as they eventually fall out of use.

"Do they even notice when it'south not neon?" he said.

A man stands in the lite of the Victory Mahjong sign at 15 Kansu St., Yau Ma Tei. Photograph by Wing Shya, courtesy of M+ Museum

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Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/photos-dying-art-neon-hong-kong

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