Neon gas was discovered in 1898 by scientists Sir William Ramsay and Morris Travers. They derived the name from the Greek word neos (“new”), and it didn’t take long for this new discovery to spark new technologies. The use of neon in signage was pioneered by a Frenchman named Georges Claude in the early 1900s, whose first commercial creation was a barbershop sign in Paris. In the 1920s, his company, Claude Neon, introduced neon signs to the United States. By the 1930s, neon had spread around the world; there were twenty thousand neon advertisements in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, most of them
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