Neon's cultural life is inseparable from its glow. When an electric current is passed through the gas at low pressure it emits an intense red-orange light, a property exploited by Georges Claude, who introduced neon lighting around 1910. The neon sign became a defining image of the twentieth-century city, so that the element's name stands in popular imagination for electric brightness, nightlife and modernity. As a noble gas discovered at the very end of the nineteenth century, neon has no alchemical or mythological tradition; its symbolism is wholly modern, built on the unmistakable colour of its discharge.
Not every glowing tube is literally neon: the vivid range of colours seen in signage comes from different fill gases and coloured or phosphor-coated glass, with pure neon supplying only the reds and oranges, while argon mixed with mercury vapour gives blues, helium gives a peachy white, and other combinations fill out the palette; the whole family is nonetheless known popularly, and inaccurately, as neon signs. The aesthetic became shorthand for a particular vision of the future in twentieth-century popular culture, most famously the rain-slicked, neon-lit streets of the film Blade Runner, and the adjective neon itself entered everyday English simply to mean electrically, artificially vivid, as in neon pink or neon green, a linguistic legacy far outweighing the element's tiny natural abundance.