First commercial neon sign

The first commercial neon sign is believed to have been created in 1909 by engineers John J Madine and Russell F Trimble (both USA), while working for tube-lighting pioneer Daniel McFarlan Moore, in Newark, New Jersey, USA. The small indoor sign that spelled out "Ingersoll" used 8-mm tubing filled with neon gas (imported from Germany) and was commissioned for the offices of the Newark-based Ingersoll Watch Company, where it remained lit for at least three years.

The letters were between 3 and 6 in (7.6–15.2-cm) tall with the neon activated by an electrode from a Cooper-Hewitt mercury-arc lamp, all mounted on to an 18-in-long (46-cm) wooden box.

The Ingersoll sign emerged around the same time as a series of non-commercial neon signs produced by physicist Perley G Nutting and glass craftsman Edward O Sperling (both USA) while working for the US National Bureau of Standards (now called the National Institutes of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. They were first put on display in April 1910 and several surviving examples can now be found in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and at the headquarters of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Both these early examples of neon lighting built on the work of other lighting innovators such as Daniel McFarlan Moore (USA), who is credited with developing the first luminous tubing (albeit using carbon dioxide and nitrogen, rather than noble gases such as neon). He first demonstrated his what-he-dubbed "etheric lighting" while presenting a paper to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on 22 April 1896, illuminating the entire hall with tube-lighting and for an added flourish using the tubing to also spell out the words "Let there be light" and "AIEE" on the walls. What came to be called "Moore tubing" or "Moore lighting" was available commercially from 1903.

The next generation of neon signs, which arguably are what we are more familiar with today, were adapted to be installed outdoors for advertising purposes. A key trailblazer here was the French engineer Georges Claude (founder of Claude Neon) who rose to prominence from the start of the 1910s, though in many of his early works the neon tubes were generally concealed behind glass panels.