Neon signs and lighting is an interesting story of those who worked to make it become what it is today. This existing history will make sense to the man on the street, and the person who just wants to own a neon sign.

It all began with a scientist Jean Felix Picard who observed a faint glowing inside the tube while using a mercury barometer on the 25th of May 1676. This was the discovery of Neon. It was the observation of light where none had been with no obvious cause. This event piqued the scientific community to investigate further into the why and wherefore of this discovery that later revealed neon gas. 234 years later in 1910 the first neon gas-filled lamp was displayed to the public.

In the year 1750 Benjamin Franklin conducted research in electricity and sold his treasures to pay for his work. Ben is best remembered for flying his kite, with a skeleton key attached to the string about 4 feet down from the kite. Because he was flying the kite in a rainstorm it went high into a lightning filled sky. Benjamin held the kite until lightning struck near enough to light him up, verifying that lightning is an electric force. He reported that he took precautions of wearing boots and standing on Wood and even then it Neon Signs NZ the hair on his arms stand up, and his fingers tingle. local News Paper reports indicated that three men got struck by lightning in the same storm.

Bill Gilbert made a careful study of this phenomenon and coined the words electric and electricity making their first appearance in print in Tom Browne's newsletter in 1646. In 1898 two chemists, Ramsay and Travers, discovered neon. These guys suspected there was a missing element in the family of inert gases that justified serious research. The fractional distillation of liquid air produced a rich mixture, helium gas and another gas they named neon.

Georges Claude was the first person to apply an electrical discharge to a sealed glass tube of neon gas to create a lamp. He displayed the first neon lamp to the public on December 11, 1910, in Paris. He invented the neon light and neon tubes which could be formed into letters and pictures which quickly became the neon sign industry, that radically changed the advertising business, resulting in the Neon sign making him a rich man.

The largest use for neon gas is in advertising signs. Neon lights contain other gases and phosphors, which yield a variety of color to the orange-red color of neon. Neon glow lamps are used as indicators of high voltage circuits, each pixel in your Plasma TV screen is a Neon Lamp, a helium / neon combination is used to make helium-neon lasers. Liquid neon gas is a cryogenic refrigerant. Neon gas is highly inert and forms no known compounds.a