An Irishman's Diary

PHILIP MARLOWE claimed he could smell Los Angeles before he arrived there. It was “stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long,” thought the fictional detective. But coloured lights were its saving grace: “There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen storeys high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.”

Though he didn’t know his name, the man Marlowe wanted thus honoured was Georges Claude, the “French Edison”, who 100 years ago this month, in December 1910, first introduced neon lighting to the world.

Not that he made it out of nothing. Perhaps the real father of the giant illuminations in LA and other cities was one Heinrich Geissler, a German glass-blower who, decades before Claude, had invented the Geissler Tube, a sealed glass cylinder, bent into fantastic shapes and using rarefied gases to produce glowing light.

Geissler’s work was in turn developed by Daniel McFarlan Moore, an American who began his career working for the actual Edison, before branching out to produce 200-foot long luminous tubes, using carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

But Claude, already a distinguished inventor, benefited from the discovery in 1898 of the inert gas that would become synonymous with his lights (even after other gases, including argon, were used). Combining Moore’s tubes with neon, the Frenchman quickly saw the commercial potential for these strips of bright red light. And when he cleared the last obstacle by devising a reliable electrode, the patent was his.

Virginia Woolf once cryptically dated the start of modernity to December 1910. Or as she put it: “On (sic) or about December 1910, human character changed.” She meant attitudes to personal freedom and the like, and why she picked December 1910 was not clear, even to her.

But the growth of cinema as mass entertainment may have been one of the influences she had in mind. In any case, 1910 was a big year for the medium (slightly too late for James Joyce, whose Volta Theatre in Dublin had been just ahead of its time).

And, as soon became apparent, cinema and neon lighting were born for each other.

After the hiatus of the first World War, which – with apologies to Woolf – probably had more of an influence on human character development, neon lights became one of the defining technologies of the 20th century. It took until 1923 before a car dealership in LA became the first US business to use them. Thereafter, they spread like forest fire, consuming such places as Las Vegas,

where the inferno still rages today.

Even Dublin succumbed belatedly, both to neon and cinemas. In fact, by 1939, as Europe descended into another war, the combination was proving problematic.

In November of that year, a letter writer to this newspaper complained that Dublin’s nightly “black-out” was being flouted by shops and picture houses. What was the point of having “cowled or extinguished street lamps” and “buses [...] fitted with dull green or blue bulbs”, he wondered, when the city continued to have “brilliantly illuminated shop windows and vivid electric signs over cinemas”? And, attracting bombs aside, the new lights posed other risks. In 1941, the Irishman’s Diary carried a wistful piece about Ireland’s last “gold-leaf craftsman”, as he plied his now-lonely trade on Dublin’s Essex Quay. As recently as 1926, there had been five members of the species there. But now, “neon lights and glass frontages have replaced the gilt letters of other days”, and for the gold-leaf man, the luminous writing was on the wall.

Incredible as it might have seemed then, certain neon signs would in time also acquire the veneer of a threatened heritage.

The most famous piece of luminous writing in Dublin is the one on Dame Lane asking a question with which many men have wrestled, ie: “Why go bald?” For decades the accompanying male face has frowned and smiled alternately, as its neon hairline ebbs and flows. But by the end of the 20th century, the sign was decrepit and threatened with removal until campaigners intervened to save it.

It survives now as one of many monuments worldwide to the man who invented neon. And although none are made from solid marble, as Marlowe wished, it’s probably just as well, because deciding who to honour with such a statue might have been problematical.

Invention can be a murky business, even in the field of illumination, as the case of McFarlan Moore demonstrates. He was shot dead on his own lawn in 1936 by an unemployed inventor enraged that Moore had beaten him to a patent.

As for Claude, his life ended less violently but in disgrace. Far from earning a marble statue, he was stripped of all his existing honours after the second World War for having collaborated with the Germans. Despite being an old man, he was also jailed for life, although in recognition of his achievements they later let him out early.