“Being and Neonness”: Neon as a Symbol of the 20th Century - The Atlantic

The once-ubiquitous form of lighting was novel when it first emerged in the early 1900s, though it has since come to represent decline.

De Miranda understands this evolution by zooming out and looking at the 1900s as the ‘neon century.’ The author draws a parallel between the physical form of neon lights, which again are essentially containers for electrified gases, and that of a glass capsule—suggesting they are a kind of message in a bottle from a time before the First World War. ‘Since then, [neon lights] have witnessed all the transformations that have created the world we live in,’ de Miranda writes. ‘Today, they sometimes seem to maintain a hybrid status, somewhere between junkyards and museums, not unlike European capitals themselves.’