---
title: "The History of Neon Signs: 1898 to LED | Helioneon"
description: "Trace the history of neon signs, from the 1898 discovery of neon gas in London to Georges Claude's Paris debut and today's LED neon. Read the full story."
url: https://helioneon.com/uk/blog/history-of-neon-signs/
---

# The History of Neon Signs: From Georges Claude to LED Neon

⚡ The essentials in 30 seconds

- Trace the history of neon signs, from the 1898 discovery of neon gas in London to Georges Claude's Paris debut and today's LED neon.
- Read the full story.
**Neon signage began in December 1910, when French engineer Georges Claude lit a neon tube in public for the first time at the Paris Motor Show.** The gas itself had been discovered in London in 1898, the first commercial sign followed in 1912, and the LED technology that dominates in 2026 arrived almost a century later.

That timeline matters, because every glowing sign you pass today carries a bit of it. At Helioneon, we make the modern chapter of the story: flexible LED neon you can [design yourself](https://helioneon.com/uk/custom-neon-sign/), with the warmth of the originals and none of the fragile glass. So let’s start at the very beginning, long before anyone had heard the word neon.

## A wobbly barometer starts it all (1675)

The prehistory of neon is oddly charming. In 1675, French astronomer Jean Picard noticed that the empty space in his mercury barometer glowed faintly when he shook it. Nobody could explain it. The effect, later called barometric light, sat in the curiosity drawer of science for more than two centuries, and honestly that delay is half the romance of this story.

What Picard had stumbled on was electrified gas emitting light. Scientists in the 1850s, notably Heinrich Geissler with his sealed gas tubes of 1857, turned that flicker into a laboratory staple. The principle behind every glass neon sign ever made was already there. It just needed the right gas.

## 1898: two chemists in London discover neon

The right gas turned up in Bloomsbury. In June 1898, Scottish chemist William Ramsay and his English colleague Morris Travers isolated a new element at University College London while distilling liquefied air. When they ran a current through a sample, it blazed crimson. Travers later wrote that the light told its own story, and you can see his point.

They named it neon, from the Greek neos, meaning new. Ramsay went on to win the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the noble gases. Here’s the twist, though: neon is not rare in the universe, but it makes up only about 0.0018% of the air we breathe, which is why nobody had spotted it earlier.

## Georges Claude, the man who bottled light

Discovery is one thing. Selling it is another. Georges Claude, a Paris engineer often nicknamed the Edison of France, ran an industrial business that liquefied air on a huge scale from 1902 onwards. Neon was a by-product he had in quantity, and he wanted a use for it.

His answer was the neon lamp. On 3 December 1910, Claude unveiled two glowing tubes, each around 12 metres long, on the facade of the Grand Palais during the Paris Motor Show. Crowds stopped. The red light was unlike anything gas lamps or early bulbs could produce, and it could be bent into shapes. Claude patented his electrode design in 1915, then licensed it aggressively, which is exactly what I would have done with a monopoly that good.

The first true commercial neon sign is generally credited to a small Paris barbershop, the Palais Coiffeur on Boulevard Montmartre, in 1912. A year later, a giant Cinzano sign glowed over the city. Advertising had found its new favourite toy.

## The golden age: from Paris to Piccadilly Circus

Neon crossed the Atlantic in 1923, when Los Angeles car dealer Earle C. Anthony bought two Packard signs from Claude’s company, reportedly for around $24,000. Drivers pulled over to stare. Within a decade, American cities were saturated: Times Square alone became a canyon of tubes, and Las Vegas later built an entire identity on them.

Britain caught the fever too. Piccadilly Circus, already famous for illuminated adverts since the early 1900s, adopted neon between the wars, and brands like Bovril and Guinness became part of the London skyline. By the 1930s, neon was shorthand for modernity itself. Cinemas, dance halls, seaside piers: if it wanted attention after dark, it wore neon.

My favourite detail from this era is the craft. Every letter was hand-bent by a glass artist over a flame, filled with neon for reds and oranges or argon and mercury for blues and greens. A single large sign could take weeks. That artistry never disappeared, and you can still see a glorious hoard of it at God’s Own Junkyard in Walthamstow, East London.

## Why did neon decline?

Partly economics, partly image. From the 1950s, cheaper plastic-faced signs lit by fluorescent tubes undercut neon on price and maintenance. Glass tubes broke. Transformers hummed and failed. And as flagship signs came down, neon slowly slid from glamorous to seedy in the public imagination, the light of all-night diners and dubious motels.

By the 1980s, many cities had lost most of their classic signs, and the number of working glass benders collapsed. Estimates vary, but the trade shrank so much that today only a few thousand skilled neon benders are thought to remain worldwide. It was a quiet fall for a technology that had once defined the modern city, and frankly it deserved better.

Preservation movements eventually pushed back. The Neon Museum in Las Vegas, founded in 1996, now shelters more than 250 rescued signs in its outdoor boneyard, and London’s God’s Own Junkyard grew from sign-maker Chris Bracey’s private collection into a place of pilgrimage. People queue to photograph what the 1970s threw in skips. Taste is a wheel, and it turned.

## The LED revival: how neon came back

Two forces brought neon home. The first was art. From the 1990s onwards, artists such as Tracey Emin turned handwritten neon phrases into gallery pieces, and the aesthetic seeped back into fashion, interiors and photography.

The second was engineering. In the 2010s, manufacturers perfected flexible LED neon: a silicone tube, about 6 mm across in our case, that diffuses light from LEDs into one continuous line with no visible dots. It runs on safe 12V current, stays cool to the touch, and is rated for around 100,000 hours of use. No gas, no glass, no high-voltage transformer. If you want the technical comparison in full, we’ve written a complete guide to [glass neon versus LED neon](https://helioneon.com/uk/blog/glass-neon-vs-led-neon/).

Purists will tell you nothing matches real gas in glass, and for museum pieces I agree. For everything else, LED neon simply wins: it is lighter, far more durable, and it consumes a fraction of the energy. That efficiency question matters more in 2026 than it ever did in 1926.

## Where neon stands in 2026

Today the word neon describes a look more than a gas. Weddings hire glowing surnames. Cafes hang script slogans above the till. Gamers frame their setups in colour. The technology behind almost all of it is LED, which is why a modern sign can carry a 3-year warranty and a [lifespan measured in decades](https://helioneon.com/uk/blog/led-neon-sign-lifespan/) rather than years.

Price has shifted just as dramatically. Where Earle Anthony paid the equivalent of a house for two signs in 1923, a [personalised LED neon piece](https://helioneon.com/uk/custom-neon-sign/) now typically costs between £100 and £500 in the UK, and we’ve broken the numbers down in our guide to [custom neon sign costs](https://helioneon.com/uk/blog/custom-neon-sign-cost-uk/). A century on, Georges Claude’s crowd-stopping invention has become something you can sketch on a Tuesday and hang the following week: Helioneon delivers in 7 days, with a free 3D mockup within 24 hours before anything goes into production.

Picard shook a barometer and saw a ghost of light. It took 335 years, two London chemists and one relentless French engineer to turn that ghost into the most charismatic signage medium ever invented. Not a bad journey for a gas that barely exists in our air.

## FAQ: the history of neon signs

French engineer Georges Claude invented the neon sign. He first demonstrated neon tube lighting at the Paris Motor Show on 3 December 1910, patented his electrode design in 1915, and his company sold the first commercial sign to a Paris barbershop in 1912.

Neon was discovered in June 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris Travers at University College London. They isolated it while distilling liquefied air and named it after the Greek word neos, meaning new. Ramsay received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on noble gases.

The first neon signs in America were two Packard signs bought in 1923 by Los Angeles car dealer Earle C. Anthony, reportedly for around $24,000. They caused such a stir that drivers stopped in the street to look, and neon spread rapidly across American cities afterwards.

Rarely. Traditional glass tubes filled with neon or argon are still made by specialist artisans, but most modern signs use flexible LED neon instead. A silicone tube diffuses LED light into a continuous line, runs on 12V, stays cool and lasts around 100,000 hours.

From the 1950s, cheaper fluorescent-lit plastic signs undercut neon on cost and upkeep, while broken glass and failing transformers made maintenance expensive. Neon’s image also drifted from glamorous to seedy. The LED revival of the 2010s reversed the decline by removing those weaknesses.

## [Guillaume Schlupp](https://helioneon.com/uk/guillaume-schlupp/)

Founder of Helioneon

Over 10 years of entrepreneurship in premium interior design. 3,000+ LED neons delivered across 13 countries under Helioneon and Light Genius. Leads product strategy, design and professional accounts.

Lighting design specialists since the launch of Helioneon. Over 500 neon signs crafted and installed across the UK and Europe. We share guides, inspiration and expert advice here.

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