Traveling through the city during the night would make you notice those brightly colored lighting fixtures sprawled on either side of the road. Dubbed as "liquid fire" by passers by, these flashing signs try to make you focus on them with different actions such as timed blinking, synchronized light displays, or even with the use of sheer size and intensity. These are neon signs, which are the modified jump off from normal fluorescent and colored light fixtures we often see on the storefront of commercial establishments such as pizza neon signs and motel neon signs. To know more about these lighting fixtures which actually glow even in broad daylight better, here are some trivial pieces of information ready for digesting.The idea behind light is the electrically heated filament or gas in an enclosed compartment. The heated gas molecules glow as a result. This is very much the same as to neon lights. The term itself suggests the kind of gas being heated within the glass. Neon is a relatively light element which is readily part of the air that we breathe. However, the process of getting just a single pound of neon would require almost about 90 thousand pounds of liquefied air. Just imagine the amount of air processed to light up the whole Las Vegas commercial district in this case.
Designing the neon sign is actually harder than just molding the glass container into specifically desired shapes. For neon signs, the process of creating a continuous figure using only one long piece of glass tubing should be carefully done. This is because the current that has to pass through the whole neon sign should be linearly continuous without any allowance of getting in contact with another entity which might discharge it. Allowing it to happen may cause the whole lighting fixture to short out or even worse, burst. Neon signs are simply sensitive to differential currents that are present in its vicinity and should be properly noticed at all times.
The neon light tubing, which was invented by the French engineer and chemist Georges Claude in 1902 glowed a red tinge. However, previous years of discoveries in relation to light making have already produced different colors using different gases stable enough to be introduced with electric current. The first gas, Mercury produced a blue color. Then there came white and gold from Carbon Dioxide and Helium, respectively. Neon, also called as the "new gas" was the fourth, but had the catchiest name hence the popular term we now use today.
