The neon sign as a commercial medium traditionally dates to 1923, Los Angeles, at Earle C. Anthony's Packard car dealership. Anthony paid French inventor Georges Claude's company $1,250 apiece for two neon signs reading 'Packard'. Crowds reportedly stopped traffic to watch them. Americans had never seen light that color — red-orange, unmistakably neon gas — in a commercial context.

The technology spread through the 1920s and 1930s as the visual syntax of American commercial culture. Las Vegas by mid-century had elevated neon from signage to cityscape — the Fremont Street corridor became a tutorial in how much light a built environment could absorb before reaching saturation. The Googie architecture of Southern California coffee shops and motels used neon not as an add-on but as a structural design element: the sign was the building's face.

Real neon tube fabrication is a craft. A neon bender heats glass tubing over a ribbon burner, shapes it by hand against a paper pattern, and pumps it with noble gases — neon for red-orange, argon with a drop of mercury for blue. A skilled bender can produce letterforms that no font file can fully replicate: the slight irregularity of hand-bent glass, the way a single tube becomes an entire word without lifting the line.

Los Angeles lost tens of thousands of neon signs from the 1960s on, as cheap plastic signs and anti-billboard civic campaigns replaced aging tubes — yet the city that started it all still has more surviving neon than any other, Las Vegas included. Source ↗

Blade Runner's (1982) Los Angeles was designed around the visual logic of mega-city neon: so many signs, so much light, that the sky itself appears to glow. Production designer Lawrence G. Paull and 'visual futurist' Syd Mead filled its skyline with neon and towering electronic billboards until advertising became part of the architecture. Source ↗

In 1913, a year after the first shop sign, a giant neon sign for the vermouth Cinzano lit the Paris skyline; by 1919 the entrance to the Paris Opera was outlined in neon tubing. Source ↗