For William Blake, etching was “the infernal method” of making art, since it involved burning an image onto a copper plate with corrosive substances. He meant “infernal” as a compliment. Had he lived a century later, you suspect he would have had a lot of fun working with neon.
The gas was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris Travers at University College London. Fourteen years later, the first neon sign appeared, adorning a hairdresser’s shop in Paris, and they soon became a byword for consumerist fantasies. In the century since, they have adorned everything from sex shops to theatres, and become indelibly linked in the popular imagination with the seediest corners of Soho, Las Vegas strip-clubs and film noir. Sex sold, and neon sold it. Beyond the red-light districts, it might appear in more polite form on billboards or shopfronts – but it has always been trying to grab the attention of passers-by in order to peddle them something.
To make a neon piece, you first have to melt glass tubes beneath a hot flame. Once twisted into shape, they’re fitted with a high-voltage transformer and a vacuum pump: the air inside the tube conducts electricity produced by the transformer, with the resultant heat burning off impurities that are extracted by the vacuum. Neon gas is then introduced into the tube, illuminated with its distinctive crimson glow by the electrical current. (You can use argon and mercury, instead, for an electric blue – or add fluorescent powders in the tube to produce other hues.) It takes at least seven years for an apprentice signmaker to learn their craft. As Yana Ryan, of Neon Specialists on the Hackney Road in east London, tells me, even for the experts there is a one-in-10 chance that the design you’ve painstakingly crafted will collapse under pressure, and you’ll have to start all over again.