Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Ramsay’s laboratory at University College no longer exists, but many of the gas discharge tubes he used to demonstrate their colourful radiance have been kept. Alwyn Davies, an organic chemist who has nevertheless developed an enthusiasm for Ramsay’s work, leads me to an unpromising breeze-block corridor and pulls open some drawers. Inside are the dumbbell-shaped glass tubes of various lengths, blown by Ramsay himself and labelled according to the gases they contain. On the inside of the glass are smoky deposits from the vapour of the platinum electrodes, the only sign of wear. Some of the tubes, he assures me, still work.

  Every element is new at the moment of its discovery, and so might deserve the name neon. Yet Travers’s ‘crimson light’ would fulfil its destiny more completely than anybody could have predicted as the century turned.

  As early as 1902, the French inventor Georges Claude began experimenting with electrical discharges within sealed tubes of neon. On 11 December 1910 he demonstrated the first commercial neon lamp to visitors at the Paris motor show. Claude’s innovation was to ensure that the chemically inert neon inside the tube remained pure, uncontaminated by more reactive gases such as nitrogen that could corrode the electrodes and reduce the brightness of the discharge. The bright red light was arresting, but was judged to have limited appeal for domestic illumination, and was certainly ruled out for use in automobiles because of the high-voltage equipment needed to generate it. However, it was perfect for advertising–the activity with which it has been indelibly associated ever since. Neon light shone brightly even on sunny days and could penetrate the city smoke, making signs visible from far away. With no apparent source of the light–no burning material, no incandescent filament, merely a hovering glow of vapour–neon possessed a magical quality. It became known as ‘liquid fire’.

  Claude was able to make his neon tubes larger and brighter by adding substances such as carbon dioxide and using constant pumping to maintain the correct vapour pressure. Furthermore, the tubes were essentially permanent; they could be manufactured remotely, filled with gas and then transported to a building where they could simply be affixed, wired up to an electricity supply, and left to run. The world’s first neon advertising message began beaming the word cinzano to promenaders on the Champs Elysées in 1913, the same year that Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring received its riotous premiere near by, and that musical chronicler of technological progress Erik Satie penned a little piano piece, ‘Sur une Lanterne’, whose optional lyrics begged the new city lights: ‘N’allumez pas encore. Vous avez le temps…’ (‘Don’t light yet. You have time…’)

  But modernity beckoned, and the lights went on without delay. Claude prospered, taking out foreign patents and gaining a virtual monopoly in neon tubes. Neon advertising arrived in the United States in 1923, when the media mogul and entrepreneur Earle C. Anthony bought from the Claude Neon company of France for the reported sum of $2,400 a pair of ‘Packard’ signs for his Los Angeles car dealership.

  Named at the outset for its own novelty, neon became the sign of the new. The cool red heat of pure neon was quickly complemented by other colours produced by different mixtures of gas. Argon-filled tubes shone a pale blue. Adding a little mercury gave a bright white light. Using tubes made of coloured glass completed the electric rainbow. ‘Neon’ in all its hues was curiously in harmony with the times. Paris and New York were perhaps the two cities with the greatest claim on the world’s attention in the first part of the twentieth century, and both made much of the new material. The artist Fernand Léger, who was working in Paris when Claude’s first sign went up there, was later excited by the ever-changing reflections of primary colours on New Yorkers’ faces produced by the signs on Broadway. The rise of Art Deco, launched at the Paris Exposition of 1925, coincided with a proliferation of automobiles and the expansion of cities and their new suburbs, each of which developed their own forms of nightlife. It was not simply the shiny new style’s emphasis on superficial gloss that made it a good fit with this new technology. With a rising tide of consumers in pursuit of amusement after dark, it was inevitable that neon became a characteristic feature not only of the entertainment districts of the major cities, but also of resorts from Miami to Le Touquet, whose new restaurants, bars and apartments sprouted neon signs and were sometimes even outlined in neon to emphasize the modern architecture.

  What excited Léger, however, drove others to distraction. In John P. Marquand’s Bostonian diary of a nobody, The Late George Apley, the eponymous Boston Brahmin, a man nonplussed by all things modern, is appalled by a visit to Broadway, where he sees new electric signs moving ‘in nervous patterns’. Such horrors are only to be expected of Manhattan. But when a similar illuminated advertisement appears in Boston, he launches a quixotically ineffectual campaign against it: ‘nor was it due to Apley’s indifference that a large electric sign, advertising a certain inexpensive variety of motor car, still flaunts itself insolently over Boston Common. He justly called this sign, to the end of his days, “Our Badge of Shame.”’ Marquand is making a connection here with more literal badges of shame, specifically the early New England custom of marking adulterers with a red letter A, the ‘scarlet letter’ of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel. Red neon lights suggest that the city is prostituting itself to commercial interests–and worse. They advertise the globalized bazaars of Piccadilly Circus and Times Square, but also the more decadent pleasures of the Pigalle and the Reeperbahn. Though ‘red-light districts’ in fact antedate neon lighting by a few years, the colour association is unfortunate nevertheless for neon and may be an additional reason why its light was considered unsuitable in the domestic environment. For those who want to read it, neon provides the luminous writing on the wall of our electric Babylon.

  It was not only in the worldly cities that neon found its role. With the paving and numbering of America’s national highways from the 1920s, wayside gas stations, motels and diners gained vital prominence from neon. Brighter than other lights, neon signs were visible at greater distances, especially in the open expanses of the West and in the clear desert night. And if the light was visible at greater distances, then the lettering also had to be larger so that the message would be legible from afar. Roadside signs were designed to be seen a mile away–then perhaps driven past at sixty.

  But in rural communities as in the cities, the newfangled glare of neon could be a signal of corruption. In The Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole, the church sign depicting the Bible ‘with its yellow pages and red letters and big blue cross in the center’ casts a searing light that symbolizes the oppressive power of the Mississippi preacher who hounds the boy narrator’s family of ‘fallen-away Christians’ to death and exile.

  The hovering transcendence of neon light has tempted artists to make their own luminous glyphs. These often twist the familiar form of advertising signs to spell out more elliptical messages. The fun is in adapting a medium that is all about instant gratification to say something slow or mysterious. For most, the actual craft of making the signs is an irrelevance. But Fiona Banner makes her own glassware, a manual procedure that connects her with the first such tubes ever made, those in Ramsay’s laboratory. ‘Neon best sells things for “now”,’ she explains to me. ‘Immediate desires–sex, kebabs, movies.’ But the disembodied quality of the light also carries timeless memories of stained glass and the sky itself, making it both ‘a retinal and cultural come-hither. When lit, it (its physicality) is hidden in its own light, the object disappears in order to be legible. It is a way of being able to say something (a word) without any voice.’ Banner’s recent work picks apart this language. Every Word Unmade is a set of twenty-six separate neon signs, one for each single letter of the alphabet, the essential ingredients of urgent messages as yet uncomposed. A work called Bones, meanwhile, gives life to the punctuation marks that are always left out of commercial neon signs. For Banner, the glowing marks, with shapes like primitive weapons found on an archaeological dig, accrue deep new meanings.

  Nowhere marr
ies neon’s wilderness entreaty and its careless urban glamour more effectively than Las Vegas. Incorporated as a city only in 1911 when it had a population of just 800, Las Vegas really began to boom in 1931, when construction began on the nearby Hoover Dam; gambling was made legal that same year. The population has more than doubled in each decade ever since and stands close to two million today. The place had a garish character from early on. The first neon beacon in the desert went up in 1929 on what was then still appropriately named the Oasis Café and was followed by the art deco tower of the Las Vegas Club in 1930, and then by a cavalcade of hotels, clubs and casinos. It was the signs (‘Caesars Palace’, ‘Golden Nugget’, ‘Stardust’, ‘Flamingo’) that defined the main commercial avenue of the city known as the Strip. With land cheap and vistas long, the signs were often taller than the sprawling buildings they advertised. But size was never going to be enough in such a competitive environment. Increasingly imaginative designs were commissioned, with flashing colours and animated graphics of, say, wine pouring into a glass or beer frothing in a stein–though seldom of cash tumbling into eager hands. The dinosaurs driven to extinction in this ceaseless parade of natural selection meanwhile are preserved in the city’s ‘neon boneyard’.

  The restless light is all too much for Raoul Duke and his attorney in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When they check into a hotel, they find directly outside their window ‘some kind of electric snake…coming right at us.

  ‘“Shoot it,” said my attorney.

  ‘“Not yet” I said. “I want to study its habits.”’

  But Duke’s attorney wisely draws the curtains.

  Two who did study its habits were the architectural theorists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Following Ed Ruscha and the Pop artists, who were first to reappraise the aesthetics of the commercial strip, they decided to make Vegas ‘our Florence’. (Tom Wolfe had already compared it to Versailles.) Venturi and Scott Brown noted that in many cases the light was the architecture. The buildings are not lit tastefully like historic landmarks; they are themselves light. They are given luminous outlines, and every surface becomes an illuminated sign for something, whether they are casinos or ‘marriage chapels converted from bungalows with added neon-lined steeples’. In their enthusiastic embrace of everything vernacular in Vegas, the only thing the architects didn’t like about the illuminations was their tendency to produce ‘big problems with bugs’. Their revulsion may have been more than just physical: perhaps they saw the insects drawn to the light as a metaphor for our own helpless attraction to neon temptations.

  But a nuisance to some is an opportunity to a serious lepidopterist such as the young Vladimir Nabokov, who once ‘caught some very good moths at the neon lights of a gas station between Dallas and Fort Worth’. Nabokov’s was much more than a childhood hobby, and on this same transcontinental car journey he also discovered a new species of butterfly, which he named Neonympha dorothea after the student who was doing the driving. Nabokov, that master of wordplay, must have loved it that the Linnaean nomenclature of his find was also able to incorporate the name of the light by which it was found.

  The image of insects swarming around a neon sign was one the author employed much later in Lolita, his notorious novel about a Parisian émigré writer Humbert Humbert’s sexual pursuit of a twelve-year-old nymphet. The later stages of the book describe a road trip around the United States, punctuated by motor courts, gas stations and candy bars. On one level the story clearly tells of old Europe’s (Humbert’s) infatuation with the new America (Lolita), but it’s a neon-lit 1950s America that turns out to be much less innocent than it appears–for Humbert is surprised to learn as their journey together begins that his captive Lolita has already been corrupted. Finally, Humbert brings himself to free Lolita to make her own life, consoling himself with the slaughter of one of her other seducers. He drives away from the murder scene to the accompaniment of ‘sherry-red letters of light’ and a restaurant sign in the shape of a coffee-pot repeatedly bursting into ‘emerald life’.

  Jezebel’s Eyes

  The Old Testament heaves with painted ladies. ‘Though you enlarge your eyes with paint, In vain you will make yourself fair,’ the Lord warns the daughters of Zion (Jeremiah 4:30). The sisters Oholah and Oholibah are judged for their lewdness in taking to their beds ‘desirable young men’ from Assyria, Egypt and Babylon. The men couldn’t help themselves of course: ‘they went in to her, as men go in to a woman who plays the harlot’, lured by come-hither looks, jewellery, and the fact that they had gone to the trouble of washing themselves and then painting their eyes (Ezekiel 23:40).

  The deeds of Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, the king of Israel in the ninth century BCE, are so unwholesome that she is dragged back to make a guest appearance in Revelation as the very embodiment of unrepentant sexual depravity. Her name has been a byword for shameless womanhood ever since. It is easy to tell she’s no good for she too ‘put paint to her eyes’ (2 Kings 9:30). St Jerome’s Vulgate Latin translation identifies the substance she used as stibio–antimony.

  The Bible makes other mentions of antimony, as the soft setting for precious stones for example, which could be referring to any lustrous metallic alloy, but identifying the cosmetic as antimony is a safer bet (although the black powder that was in long-established usage for darkening around the eyes was in fact antimony sulphide, the element and its compounds being hard to disentangle at a time when the basic rules of chemical combination were still unknown). The Hebrew and Arabic term for this substance is kuhl, from which the modern eye-shadow kohl is named.

  Despite the dramatic pictorial evidence of wall paintings that black eye make-up was a feature of daily life longer ago in ancient Egypt, it is not clear whether it was antimony that was being used. Certainly, there were other black powders available, the handiest being carbon in the form of lamp black or the darker bone black, which was often used to coat the eyelashes. (This ‘mascara’ came to be just as damnable as the black antimony eye-shadow, it seems: the word stems from the Italian for ‘witch’.) But antimony was regarded as the superior product and, aside from appearing to make the eyes brighter, was claimed to produce a variety of benefits from soothing the brow to dilating the pupils, an effect due perhaps to the element’s being an eye irritant.

  Antimony is one of many often hazardous substances that have been enlisted over the centuries in the cause of making us more beautiful. A technical compendium called Harry’s Cosmeticology runs an alarming gamut from aluminium (powder for glittery eyes) to zirconium (salts to strengthen the fingernails). The listing includes arsenical pyrites as a depilatory, bismuth oxychloride as a pearlescent addition to lipsticks, and cadmium sulphide for fighting dandruff, in an index that counts more than forty of the elements in all.

  I rush to my wife’s dressing table to see what lurks among the sweetly perfumed, innocuous-looking white creams, but am surprised–and alarmed–to find that, unlike foods, the packages carry no explanatory labels. Has a business with an infamous record of using dangerous chemicals so cleaned up its act that no accounting is necessary? Or is the risk judged acceptable in the name of beauty? Although chemists have devised new materials that offer marvellous colours, the cosmetics industry finds it prudent to confine itself to a relatively small repertoire of dyes approved by bodies such as the United States Food and Drug Administration. So-called interference pigments then tweak the few basic colours in order to produce the greater range of shades that the market demands. Today, many lipsticks use intensely coloured organic dyes such as fluorescein dispersed in a medium of white titanium dioxide powder rather than heavy metal pigments. Odd plasticky additions supply other desirable effects, such as microscopic balls of Perspex used to give a pearlescent gloss.

  Samuel Johnson possessed ‘an apparatus for chymical experiments’ and called chemistry his ‘daily amusement’. His familiarity with the science is reflected in his famous dictionary, which includes entries for most of the element
s known to science by the mid eighteenth century, including the newly isolated cobalt. His entry for antimony is especially entertaining. ‘The reason of its modern denomination,’ he suggests, as opposed to the Latin stibium,

  is referred to Basil Valentine, a German monk; who, as the tradition relates, having thrown some of it to the hogs, observed, that, after it had purged them heartily, they immediately fattened; and therefore, he imagined, his fellow monks would be the better for a like dose. The experiment, however, succeeded so ill, that they all died of it; and the medicine was henceforth called antimoine; antimonk.

  It was natural that Johnson should think to include antimony. What today seems to us a rather marginal element was then held in high esteem, having been regarded as centrally important by the alchemists. Though the dark arts of alchemy had begun to yield to a more systematic chemistry, the alchemists’ texts were still necessary references, even if they were not always quite what they purported to be. A mysterious tome called The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony speaks of antimony’s ability to cure leprosy and the French pox, but also contains some solid science, accurately noting the element’s two contrasting forms–a brittle silvery metal and a grey powder. Alchemists regarded this duality as significant, for it brought antimony close to both mercury and sulphur, mother and father of all the metals.

  The fact that antimony can take these two forms was a source of much hermeneutical head-scratching. To complicate matters, the element occurs in nature most often as the sulphide stibnite. Prepared in certain ways this black powder, Jezebel’s kohl, changes again, turning orange, with no hot furnace or special apparatus required to shift between these confusing forms. Johnson was having a little fun with his etymology: the word antimony is derived in fact from anti monos, meaning against singleness, a straightforward reference to these shifting properties, and nothing to do with the element’s ill effects on the brothers of the church (though the word monk comes from monos too).