Genesis. Righto. In the beginning (1857), a French guy going by the name of Alexandre E Becquerel had the smashing idea of building fluorescent tubes to provide light. He fiddled around with ideas like coating electric discharge tubes with luminescent materials. It is this general idea that inspired Peter Cooper Hewitt. Now Pete was proactive and patented the first mercury vapour lamp, in the good old days of Pete’s low pressure mercury arc lamp is the very first prototype of today's modern fluorescent lights. It is believed that our mate Pete was inspired even more so by the mid 19 th century work of German physicist Julius Plucker and glassblower Heinrich Geissler. These guys reckoned that by shooting electricity through a glass tube filled with wee bits of gas, they could make light.

And then there was light. Remember Pete? He started developing these mercury-filled tubes in the late 1890s. However, he discovered that they gave off an unappealing bluish-green light. Pete was an optimist, and through all this doom and gloom he managed to find a positive aspect.. The amount of light produced from this tube was staggering, so he knew he was on to something. He realised that few people would want his lamps in their homes, so concentrated on finding another use for them. Being the crafty bugger he was, he tweaked his lights until they were useful for something. This purpose turned out to be lighting for photographic studios and industrial use. Peter teamed up with another bloke called George Westinghouse and together they formed the Westinghouse-controlled Cooper Hewitt Electric Company, a company I like to call WCCHEC. This company produced the first commercial Mercury lamps.

But wait, there’s more! So Peter’s lamp is the direct parent of today’s modern fluorescent lights. These lights put out shitloads of UV light and it was then discovered that if the inside of the glass tube was coated with a fluorescent chemical (one that absorbed UV light and re-radiated that energy as visible light), they could make a bloody brilliant light source. And thus the fluorescent light was born.

Neon Lights: An Illuminating history. Those Frenchies sure knew their lights. The notion of neon lights first came to be in 1675 when Jean Picard, a French astronomer, spotted that mercury in a barometer produced a faint glow. Because OSH wasn’t around back then, he decided to shake the barometer. When he did this, the amount of light increased. Picard and his scientist mates continued to look into this concept, even though the scientific community didn’t really know how barometric light worked. After the basics of electricity were identified, scientists began developing new forms of lighting, which would soon be known as neon lights. Wow.

Yeah. Fast forward 300 odd years and this brings us to Yep, another Frenchman. This guy was called Georges Claude and he was the first person to chuck electricity into a sealed tube of neon gas. It took him 8 years to get it up to scratch for the public eye and in 1910, he put the world’s first neon light on display in Paris. He was an enterprising wee bugger and created a company called Claude Neon to manufacture and sell his invention. Neon lights first made their way over to America in 1923 when Earl Anthony purchased two of them for US$12000 each, in the shape of the word ‘Packard’ for a dealership named.. Packard. The idea spread like AIDS throughout America from these signs and due to the fact that they were visible in the daytime as well as the night, they were super popular for both outdoor and indoor advertising.

What about the future of these types of lights?

Simple.

Q&A Questions and Answers

What if I was a small, angry, Asian man and together with my friend, who is also small, angry and Asian, wanted to have a fight with fluorescent lights?

Fear not.

What does a Fluorescent light look like?

How do I prove to a girl that I am manly, strong and a bit of a dick?

End.