In White Noise, novelist Don Delillo imagines an American university where professors in the popular culture department devote their energy to reading cereal boxes and the like. Thirty years after this satire, we not only have real academics writing about the history and utility of neon as an advertising medium, but exhibitions dedicated to it. In the UK, the Grundy Art Gallery has, according to them, just mounted the island’s most extensive survey of neon as art to date.
Neon first appeared in Paris in 1910, and before World War I there were already more than 160 neon advertisements throughout France. Along with neon, argon and sodium were also found to glow, due to the introduction of an electrical current. It was the French physicist and chemist Georges Claude who first stabilized and patented the process of neon and brought it to the world at large.
Read more here: https://hyperallergic.com/341241/the-enduring-glow-of-neon-art/