Georges Claude patents the neon discharge tube for lighting
On this day · 19 January 1915
A French chemist's clever electrode turned a glowing gas into the signage that would light up the modern city.
On January 19, 1915, French engineer and chemist Georges Claude received U.S. Patent 1,125,476, titled “System of Illuminating by Luminescent Tubes.” The document laid the foundation for neon lighting, the glowing tubes that would soon outline theaters, diners, and skylines across the world.
Neon gas glows when an electric current passes through it, a phenomenon already known. Claude’s real breakthrough was practical: electrodes large enough to withstand constant bombardment without quickly corroding, letting a tube burn brightly for a long time without replacing its gas. His patent specified an electrode area “exceeding 1.5 square decimeters per ampere.”
The patent on the electrodes, not the glow itself, gave Claude his grip on the market.
That detail became the legal cornerstone of his company, Claude Neon Lights, which held a near-monopoly on neon signage in the United States into the early 1930s. Claude had effectively patented the look of the twentieth-century night.
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