Neon is a noble gas with a special atomic structure that doesn’t react with anything. That’s why it glows like crazy when you run electricity through it. Georges Claude lit the first neon tube in Paris in 1910. Within two decades, the stuff had colonised main streets from Shanghai to Las Vegas. Neon signs told you that a place was open, cheap and probably a bit disreputable. The art of neon survives now mostly in the hands of people who still bend the glass by hand. It’s all in the narrated video, watch it by clicking on the image!
