Neon

The 'liquid fire' that completely changed the image of the city

Georges Claude (Paris, September 4, 1870 - Saint-Cloud, May 23, 1960)

How the son of a French teacher who opposed official education liquefied air, invented the neon light and manufactured a powerful bomb with which he single-handedly almost took the life of the German emperor over Belgium.

How he spent a fortune to realize an idea of Jules Verne and then fell under the spell of Hitler.

So that a judge afterwards sentenced him to life imprisonment, after which he simply continued his profession - inventing - in prison, giving the impression that he was not in his right mind and after three and a half years, at the age of eighty, was released. came.

And continued to invent for another ten years.

'I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble.

There's a boy who really made something out of nothing.' Detective Marlowe, philosophizing in The Little Sister (1949) by Raymond Chandler Paris, June 26, 1945.

In court, a witness says of the defendant: 'He has an inventor's mentality, and it is close to the mentality of a paranoia, as evidenced by his errors of judgment, his exalted personality, his pride and vanity, his socially inappropriate behavior. '

Since he is apparently completely deaf, the defendant wears a complicated hearing aid of his own invention. But it is not working properly. When the jury delivers the verdict, he says, "Eh?" The chairman shouts even louder. But the old man doesn't hear a thing. Finally his counsel puts his lips to the ear of the accused and shouts, "Lifelong!" The old man nods. Sadly shaking his head, he is led away.

Thus ended shortly after the Second World War the spectacular career of Georges Claude, 'the French Edison', inventor of neon light, the man who managed to liquefy air on an industrial scale, the inventor of thermal energy, a technique that in times of energy crises. receives worldwide attention.

Although a street has been named after him in cities such as Tours, Rouen, Aix-en-Provence and Montpellier, the chemical engineer Georges Claude is hardly known in France. He did indeed make 'something out of nothing', as Detective Marlowe philosophizes.

A 'monument' to Claude, as Marlowe innocently asks, cannot be found in all of France. His conviction for high treason was certainly decisive in this.

The Claude family came from Lorraine and had fled to Paris during the war of 1870, when Germany annexed Lorraine. Father Eugène was a teacher and inventor who, through hard work, had become vice president of the prestigious Saint-Gobain glassworks.

He forbade his son to go to school and taught him himself. He did this so well that young Georges was admitted to the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle at the age of sixteen.

Here he studied under the guidance of the well-known physicist Arsène d'Arsonval, with whom he would remain friends until his death in 1940. d'Arsonval's passions would become those of Claude.

After his doctorate in 1891, he worked in numerous electric companies, and at night he devoted himself to the chemical issues of the time. In Germany, chemical companies such as BASF, Bayer and Hoechst had experienced spectacular growth.

France was behind. Claude threw himself into the race. The new industry had a great need for oxygen, but it was very expensive.

Could it be cheaper? Shortly before the turn of the century, he worked on a process for liquefying air and then separating the various components, particularly into oxygen and nitrogen and noble gases such as neon, xenon and krypton, all three of which were only discovered in 1898.

Nitrogen was also commercially interesting, both for the production of fertilizers and explosives. Explosive? The French knew they would never peacefully recover the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany.

In 1902, Georges Claude described in his diary the moment when he liquefied air for the first time: 'Today, May 25th, is a Sunday, but I could not rest under these circumstances.

By a happy coincidence I connected a simple pipe 2 centimeters in diameter and 1 meter long to the outlet of an expansion vessel and closed the other end with a tap. I filled them with the cooled compressed air from the pressure reducer.

Then, trembling with anticipation at this supreme moment, I started the machine. After a moment of anxious waiting, the precious liquid began to flow. Finally.'

As of May 1899, his fellow student Paul Delorme had already set up a syndicat to collect funds from friends and relatives to financially support Claude's experiments.

Twenty-four of them – Claude's father Eugène was also there – founded the company Air Liquide on November 8, 1902, based on Claude's inventions. Delorme became chairman and led the commercial activities, Claude the research.

On April 23, 1905, he produced his first 280 cubic meters of 97 percent pure oxygen.

At the outbreak of the First World War, the company had factories in Paris, Lyon, Lille, Nantes, Marseille and Exincourt and traded with ten countries (with Belgium from 1906, with the Netherlands from 1913).

Today, Air Liquide is a multinational company, world leader in the production of industrial and medical gases, a billion-dollar company with more than 36,000 employees in 70 countries.

During the First World War, Air Liquide supplied disinfectants to military hospitals on a large scale, as well as poison gases for warfare. Claude was delighted: he invented a cannon that worked with air compression, a system to detect artillery positions with sound and his 'bombe Claude', an incendiary bomb to target the enemy from the early planes. The armed forces appointed the inventor as air force captain. He was assigned a squadron and helped himself - by hand, as was the custom at the time - to bomb enemy lines. In September 1915, Claude said he missed the German Kaiser Wilhelm II by a hair, in his own words, above Tielt in Belgium. Almost single-handedly he had changed the First World War. But it turned out differently. After a supply of his bombs exploded prematurely, killing twenty French soldiers, the generals halted the experiment. Much to the displeasure of the inventor.

A fascinating waste product After the British chemist Sir William Ramsay, the discoverer of all those noble gases, had personally ordered liquid oxygen from him, Claude became extremely interested in these gases, a waste product for him.

For example, if you put neon in a glass tube and passed electricity through it, you obtained an unprecedented red color. That was in 1907. Through his father at Saint-Gobain he had excellent contact with glassblowers.

He applied for a patent on March 7, 1910 and when the twelfth Motor Show opened on December 3, 1910 in the Grand Palais near the Champs-Elysées, Claude had installed two of his neon tubes on the front facade, 45 mm in diameter and each 11 meters long.

“I did the work myself,” he writes in his memoirs. A year later he lit the Saint-Ouen church in Rouen in the same way on the occasion of the 'millénaire normand' there.

Claude was disappointed that the light was not suitable for reading, that it was not suitable for indoor use. The advertising man Jacques Fonseque, who works for the lighting company Paz et Silva, convinced him of the publicity possibilities.

In 1912, at number 14 boulevard Montmartre (now the Hard Rock Café), the letters 'Le Palace Coiffeur' appeared above the door of a hairdresser. That same year also a Cinzano advertisement – just the seven letters – one meter high on the roof of Boulevard Haussmann number 72.

Claude bought into Paz et Silva, which was henceforth called Claude, Paz et Silva, in order to closely follow the development. It turned out that you could generate other colors with other noble gases.

Neon gave red light, argon with a touch of mercury gave blue, helium yellow, krypton white with a purple tint and xenon white-blue light. Although the technology was still prohibitively expensive at the time, Paris had approximately 150 neon signs at the outbreak of the First World War.

Cuba and Brazil

In the early 1920s, Claude - now famous and wealthy - started developing an old project of his teacher d'Arsonval, that of the Oceanic Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC).
a technique to generate electricity based on the temperature difference between the surface water and the deeper layers of the ocean. D'Arsonval had the idea from Jules Verne 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And Claude was an absolute admirer.

In 1928 he did a first exercise on the banks of the Meuse in Ougrée near Liège, using cooling water from the blast furnaces at 33 degrees and Meuse water at 13 degrees. And it worked.

With his private yacht Jamaica, he set out to find a suitable place somewhere in the world to supply a city with electricity. He found it in Matanzas Bay, 40 miles east
east of Havana. Central to this were gigantic pipelines with a diameter of two meters with which the cold water had to be pumped up from great depths. A monster project. Work began in the spring of 1929.

Three times – most recently in July 1930 – the tubes washed into the ocean.

Sometimes because of poor communication – if only he had known walkie-talkies, according to a contemporary commentary – usually because of bad weather or wild currents. Sometimes he also suspected people of sabotage: the paranoia of the inventor.

Although Georges Claude had already used up his support funds (40 million French francs) after the first attempt, he continued twice with his own financial means. In the end, he had indeed generated 22kW by means of a low-pressure turbine, enough to light 40,500 lamps.

He had proven it could be done. Money could never be an obstacle for a world-class inventor, so he immediately planned to start again off the coast of Santiago de Cuba. He sought 3 to 4 million dollars for this, a new fortune.

Because of the Wall Street crash of October 1929, no one could finance that anymore.

Georges Claude did not give up. In 1933 he bought La Tunisie, a 10,000 ton freighter in Dunkirk, and had it remodeled for his thermal energy project. Five hundred men worked on it for a year. In October 1934 it was able to moor off the coast of Rio de Janeiro.

Due to the weather conditions, Claude only started work in February. A series of fierce earthquakes at one point destroyed part of the work. Due to the delays, Claude was no longer able to cover the costs – the ship had 80 crew members.

To protect his patents, he sunk the ship with dynamite himself. No wonder that Claude's megalomaniac projects are highly questioned by both scientists and senior officials in France.

Was the man good with his

head? Or was he chasing a silly childhood dream from Verne's books? In any case, Claude's thermal techniques – the Claude cycle – are more popular than ever in the world today.

The concept is particularly suitable for energy supply on islands in warm seas and in developing countries in the tropics.

Neon lamp becomes fluorescent tube

In the meantime, neon light made a steep advance in the 1920s and 1930s. Benefits enough.

You could see the light well in bad weather conditions, the lamps did not break, the electricity consumption was low, you could bend the tubes nicely, make drawings with them, as it were, and the special colors had a fascinating effect. One Earle C.

Anthony, a Packard car dealer from Los Angeles, discovered the new light in 1923 when visiting Paris. He had two identical Packard illuminated signs "bend" for $24,000, the price of a small house, and took them to California.

The Packard ad – in blue letters with an orange border around it – simply stopped traffic on Wilshire Boulevard in LA, so great was the surprise.

Anthony himself was also a phenomenon: he founded one of the first radio broadcasters in 1922 and went down in history as the inspiration of the Golden Gate Bridge and founder of the Greyhound bus company. A dream promoter of the futuristic neon light.

Must it be said that American culture 'turned' the neon light into a primal American substance? Symbol of American dynamism and progress? By 1927, New York alone had 750 neon signs.

Art Deco movie theaters all over the country unpacked with grandiose, sexy, firework-like curves. Two thousand neon light factories, together with five thousand glass benders, spread across the country.

Especially the international exhibitions of the 1930s – Chicago in 1934, Brussels in 1935, Paris in 1937, New York in 1939 – tried to outdo each other in neon lighting. Separate studies have been published about the distribution of the special light in cities such as Las Vegas.

Georges Claude had already patented his neon tubes in the United States in 1915. Over the years he handed over the care of everything related to neon to André Claude, a son of his brother.

Under the name 'Claude Néon', the Claudes sold their licenses all over the world. Claude Neon firms still exist under the same name in the United States, Australia and South Africa, among others.

In the Netherlands, the Haaxman brothers, also a company that is still active, transported the first expensive illuminated advertising from Paris to the Netherlands in a box in 1922.

In the 1930s, a true patent war erupted in the Western world over what is today the ordinary fluorescent tube, the logical successor to the neon tube. Tl stands for 'tube luminescent'. It works with a phosphor coating. The Claudes also tried to play a strong role in this.

Claude, Paz et Silva introduced the first standardized fluorescent tube in 1937.

Georges Claude remained the great idea machine that he had always been: he developed an artificial diamond, a technique to track down aircraft lost at sea (with sound), or set up a project to extract gold from the Dead Sea or irrigate the Sahara.

He wrote, lectured, published books. 'He lived to invent and invented to live,' says his biographer. But he also suffered great disappointments.

With his work he never again got the connection with the military top he had known in the First World War; and that bothered him. He had developed a new, much more efficient and cheaper process for synthesizing ammonia under high pressure.

Strangely enough, the French army opted for the classic German method. Claude saw this as a betrayal of French science. In 1929 he wrote a book to denounce this. He felt insufficiently supported by the government in all his projects.

And although he made fortunes with Air Liquide and with his neon company, he was always tight financially.

He himself had contributed to this official resistance in part through his open sympathy for the Action Française: a monarchist, authoritarian, right-wing party that fiercely opposed the Third Republic.

In the parliamentary elections of 1928, he traveled through his constituency as a candidate with a truck full of laboratory equipment with which he demonstrated chemical tests in halls and rooms - for ordinary citizens and farmers. 'With the help of science you can bring prosperity to this country', was his message.

And Georges Claude felt himself to be the incarnation of that science. Despite all his enthusiasm and effort, he was defeated by the communist candidate. That also angered him greatly.

Treason

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, the Action Française - nevertheless strongly French nationalist - rallied behind Marshal Pétain, the leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime. That doesn't seem logical, but in their eyes it was the choice for the smallest evil. They wanted a new French kingdom and saw more salvation in a military leader like Pétain than in the Third Republic, so hated by them, with its Popular Front of socialists and communists. Prominent members of the Action Française later joined the resistance, but Georges Claude became Petain's top adviser on science issues and continued to support the Nazis. Until the very end. He had a brief slump when the Allies landed in North Africa in late 1942. He tried to end his life with a hefty dose of strychnine.

For the rest he gave lectures in town and country on the merits of National Socialism ('at his own expense', the indictment stated).

As late as July 1944, when the Allies had already landed in Normandy and were marching on Paris, Georges Claude signed a petition calling for even harsher punishments for resistance fighters.

This killed him. On June 26, 1945, he was sentenced to life for high treason. About the same time, the director general of Air Liquide, the company once founded on Claude's inventions, received the highest accolade for his resistance activities.
From his cell, Georges Claude tried to take out a patent on a technique for sucking fish from the seawater directly into a ship with a huge pump and immediately freezing it with liquid air.

"Only simple solutions are worth considering," he once said in an interview. His lawyer noted that he often saw him standing in front of the window in his cell with a pot full of water and strange measuring instruments. He refused to say what he was doing.

In early 1950, Claude was released on the grounds of 'mental confusion'. He was now almost 80 and owned absolutely nothing, all his possessions had been declared forfeit. Claude lived another ten years and again threw himself into 'his' thermal energy.

In 1955, his beloved cousin André Claude, the man who had developed the neon project for him and distributed it worldwide, died all too young. In 1957 he published his memoirs, Ma vie et mes inventions.

George Claude had mainly worked with raw materials that were free: ocean water and air. That makes it modern, contemporary. Neon is simply in the air and does not pollute the atmosphere. "There's a boy who really made something out of nothing," wrote Raymond Chandler in 1949.

He couldn't know how close he was to the truth.

In his younger years Claude had been 'un véritable colosse', 'grand, blond, les yeux très clairs'. Burnt out by his boundless energy and ground down by the war, he ended up as "a trembling white-haired old man."

But his companies, his neon tubes and his ideas are still there.
(See also: LED light)

The writer Jules Verne (1828-1905), pioneer of the science fiction genre, has been very inspiring to many generations of French engineers and scientists.

To Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923), for example, the constructor of the Eiffel Tower, to the car manufacturer André Citroën (1878-1935) and also to Arsène d'Arsonval (1851-1940), teacher of Claude.

Georges Claude himself said: 'Jules Verne, c'est lui qui m'a donné le goût de la science.'

In 1930 Georges Claude wrote the foreword for the book Des anticipations de Jules Verne aux réalisations d'aujourd'hui by A. Jacobson and A. Antoni. The subjects of marine energy and liquefied gases each form a chapter in this work.

Claude knew perfectly well which ideas from Verne's books he was working on. D'Arsonval developed the OTEC idea in 1881 following a passage from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869). He was, however, an academic, a theorist. Claude a doer, an achiever.

That is why in 1928 in Ougrée near Liège, on the banks of the Meuse, he was the first to test the OTEC principle and subsequently traveled to Cuba and Brazil.

Chapter 12 in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is devoted entirely to electricity.

Captain Nemo explains to Professor Aronnax: 'J'aurai pu, en effet, en établissant un circuit entre des fils plongés à différentes profondeurs, obtenir de l'électricité par la diversité des températures qu'ils éprouvaient.' In an older Dutch translation: 'For example, I could have obtained electricity from the different temperatures experienced by metal wires when I immerse them at different depths.'

A little further on, 'air liquide' can be heard as Captain Nemo says: 'If the electricity does not provide me with all the necessary pure air, it still sets pumps in motion, which compress the air in a receptacle.'
Jules Verne, in turn, was inspired by the discovery of the thermoelectric effect by Thomas Seebeck (1770-1831) in 1821 in which the transition between two metals produces an electrical voltage when exposed to a temperature difference.

(See also: aerial photography)

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