An Exploration of Neon-Sign Origins

(Ed. Note: In December, ST published Leon Dixon’s article about the “first neon sign in the U.S.” Dixon had contacted me more than a year ago, and I’d agreed to publish his article. In the interim, I became aware of Prof. DeLyser’s research and some contrary evidence. I’m still not certain who is more “right.” I decided to publish both articles separately in order to give each an individual spotlight and, perhaps most importantly, to elicit any other solid documentation on the subject. I know opinions, theories, conjectures, etc. exist by the dozens. I’m acutely aware of the power and permanence of the published word, especially during this electronic age, and I weighed my responsibility as a journalist to publishing “the truth.” So I fully accept responsibility for publishing these two articles, with a confidence that a greater good will be ultimately served.)
– Wade Swormstedt, ST Publisher/Editor

What is a neon sign? Must it advertise a product, service or business? Must it be sold as a product for profit in a commercial venture? Must it be outdoors? Must it run neon, or can it use another noble gas? Must it actually say something? Or is it anything, in any place, using electrically charged gas in a sealed tube? The answers are critical in chronicling the history of neon. Here, we don’t claim to have discovered the first neon sign in America, Europe, or anywhere, but we provide selected early examples, and refute some popular notions about neon’s history.

Early use of electrical discharge, inside glass tubes, is widely attributed to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Geissler in 1857. Geissler’s tubes were fanciful in shape, but spelled no words; they advertised no product, and were not sold to customers.

By 1891, Nikola Tesla, as a sidebar to his work with high-voltage power sources, was demonstrating wired and wireless luminous tubing bent into representational messages (letters, words, images). Tesla’s efforts were specifically constructed to draw attention to him and his work, and, as such, were advertising, but none were sold as end products.

In 1898, after neon’s discovery as a noble gas that could be separated from air, Burlington House, a London science-and-art academy, made (or had made) a three-color sign reading “Vical Victoria Regina” (ST reported this in its December 1927 issue). It advertised Burlington’s capabilities, but not its wares.

American Daniel McFarlan Moore did sell his luminous-tube lighting: possibly first to a Newark, NJ hardware store in 1904. Moore’s tubes, which used carbon dioxide or nitrogen, primarily lit stores, offices and churches from above, but also provided many of the criteria of a “neon sign” when, that same year, he spelled “The World.”

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Moore’s tubes had appeared in New York in different applications since 1896 (when he lit his office with “Welcome”), and had in fact been the inspiration for Georges Claude’s neon work when, in 1910, Moore allowed Claude to fill his tubes with neon captured by Claude’s new extraction method.

If a neon “sign” must spell a word and promote a product, service or business to the general public, then America’s first neon sign is actually two signs, made by optical physicist Dr. Perley G. Nutting of the National Bureau of Standards for display at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. The two signs, reading “NBS” and “Helium,” were made from tubing pumped with neon, and displayed indoors at the bureau’s booth. They are today housed in the Smithsonian Institution, having received very little attention over the years (ST, founded in 1906, did not yet exist to report on them).

But if the criterion is that a sign must be representational, pumped with neon, and, made commercially, then, in 1909, John J. Madine and Russell F. Trimble, working in their Newark, NJ laboratory, made the first neon sign: a small indoor sign for the Ingersoll watch company. Madine bent 8mm tubing into 3- and 6-in. letters, and pumped them with neon obtained from Germany (extracting neon from air was still difficult), using an electrode from a Cooper-Hewitt mercury-arc lamp, and mounting the sign on an 18-in.-long wooden box. It burned for three years, at least part of that time in the offices of the Ingersoll Watch Co. (The development was reported in ST’s October 1928 issue.)

If a sign must be commercial, pumped with neon, and installed outdoors, then, by default, George Claude’s firm, Claude Neon, made the first neon signs in France. A 1910 photograph reveals some of Claude’s early work: the church at Rouen was, in the words of photographer Léon Gimpel, “enflamed by neon,” but the tubing was not exposed, and it spelled no words.

Claude did make representational signs. The first such effort is said to be for a Paris barber, but no known photograph of that has surfaced. By 1913, however, another Claude outdoor sign, “Musica”, advertised a business in words. The neon tubing however, was masked by the glass faces of the letters.

In the U.S., most sources cite, as the first American sign, Earle C. Anthony Inc.’s “Packard” sign said to have appeared on the corner of 7th and Flower Sts. in downtown Los Angeles in 1922 or 1923.

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Previously unpublished air photos (see p. 109) tell a different tale. The corner is readily recognizable from the air because of the apartment complex known as Martz Flats, with its articulated roofline kitty corner to where the sign is said to have been, and a large Lincoln dealer (Harold L. Arnold) down the street. The sign was not present in 1922, 1923 or 1924: No sign at all was there in 1922; all that was present in 1923 was an ordinary, non-illuminated billboard. But on December 2, 1924, billboard company Foster and Kleiser obtained a permit from the Los Angeles Dept. of Buildings to extend its existing billboard by 5 ft.

The result is visible in an air photo from February 1925: the new, taller billboard has spotlights on its top, and what appears to be an electrical box at its rear. A hazy air photo from that same month reveals the front of the billboard, which shows what appears to be a tower, with wires radiating downward from it, and, in a box “suspended” by the wires, a word.

Earle C. Anthony, Inc.’s Packard advertising campaign from this period used the company’s radio towers (erected on the roof of the dealership in 1922 and illuminated by incandescent signs that named the dealership and the radio station), as in the company’s illuminated billboard (see ST, December 2013, p. 62; and January 2014, p. 6) at the corner of Wilshire and Western in 1926. A closer look reveals the glass tubing of the neon “Packard” logo.

Clearly these are outdoor advertising messages, but by October 1924 (well before the Packard billboard could have appeared) ST had already reported on several neon signs in New York City, including the largest one – for Overland automobiles. The much-lauded Packard sign at 7th and Flower, though early and revolutionary, was not first.

It is possible however, that another Earle C. Anthony, Inc. Packard sign was the first outdoor neon sign in America. A photograph of the company’s dealership on Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco, identifiable as 1923 by the license plates on the vehicles outside, shows three signs. The two smaller, channel-letter signs are clearly electrified (the conduit is visible). Because the glass covering the shallow channel letters mounted on a shallow box would make service nearly impossible, if these were incandescent signs, these could be neon signs like the early French signs with the tubing not exposed. The roof sign, visible here only from the rear, could be neon or incandescent, but it’s not a Packard sign: digitally reversing the image and correcting for the angle of the photograph reveals that the roof sign says “Overland” (a marque also distributed by the Anthony company). Are these then, America’s first neon signs? Define “neon sign,” first, then you be the judge.