The element neon was discovered and named in 1898, when the periodic table looked like this. You may notice the lighter elements are nearly all accounted for, except for the noble gases, which remained elusive due to not interacting with anything. That year, Sir William Ramsay and Morris Travers used a novel apparatus to isolate and remove all gases individually from a sample of air, identifying three previously unkown trace (neon is 18 ppm of air) nonreactive elements. Neon was named after Greek νέος (néos), meaning “new”. The other two elements were named krypton (hidden) and xenon (foreign).

A naturally-occurring element, the vast majority of all neon in existence originates from oxygen-helium fusion in main sequence stars. While experimenting with his discovery, Ramsay noticed that neon gave off a brilliant, unforgettable red glow when electric current was passed through it. Commercial exploitation of this valuable property was initially discouraged by neon’s scarcity and cost. Once neon started being extracted from air in useful amounts in 1902, the first neon lights were created in 1923 (prototyped 1910) by replacing the nitrogen in Moore Tubes with neon. People would stop and stare at the unmissable lights even in daylight, describing them as “liquid fire”.

The neon sign’s heyday was the 1930s through 1950s, with a retro revival in the 1980s. They could be used as a visible shorthand for the growth of the modern advertising industry. Today, most light fixtures we call “neon signs” are actually LEDs. The adjective also stuck for the “neon colors” we associate with those signs (actually produced by phosphor coatings that fluoresce under UV light, which neon lights emit), commonly used to refer to highlighters. Sixteen Crayola crayon colors were rebranded as neon colors in 1993.