Neon is a noble gas that refuses to react with anything, which is precisely why it glows so obligingly when you run a current through it. Georges Claude lit the first neon tube in Paris in 1910, and within two decades the stuff had colonised main streets from Shanghai to Las Vegas — the light that told you a place was open, cheap and probably a bit disreputable. Then plastic boxes and fluorescent strips quietly put the trade out of business. It survives now mostly in the hands of people who still bend the glass by hand, which is what this short documentary is about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUyOEpB03Mg