Name: Why This 100-Year-Old Company Is Recreating a Lost Neon Color
Uploaded: 2026-08-11T16:00:00Z
Duration: 9 min 38 s
Description: America’s neon signs are slowly going dark. Certain colors are disappearing and so are the neon artisans still practicing the specialized craft.

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America’s neon signs are slowly going dark. Certain colors are disappearing and so are the neon artisans still practicing the specialized craft. Photo: Dan Cain

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260811/4b1897cc-79eb-4635-aaa1-0918b26ce249/3/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

America’s neon signs are slowly going dark. Certain colors are disappearing and so are the neon artisans still practicing the specialized craft.

Why This 100-Year-Old Company Is Recreating a Lost Neon Color

Let's talk about the evolution of human beings. We evolved sensory organs, our eyes, and we were drawn to the light.

People were just like in awe of it when it first come out. They called it liquid fire.

The one thing about neon is once you see a beautiful display, you never forget it.

In "Casablanca," you see a neon sign, it's striking because it's black and white and it still shows up.

We used quite a lot of it on the film "Eyes Wide Shut" for Stanley Kubrick. He wanted the whole film to be natural lighting.

The cultural significance of neon in a nutshell, I hate to use the word iconic because it gets so overused, but it is, and unfortunately it is often a story of disappearing.

I might get one or two jobs a month because everybody's going LED.

Over the last few years, there has been a reduction in the amount of colors that are available.

Green is no longer the green that we've used. Green has more of a bluish green tint.

There have been colors in the past that were no longer cost-effective. Some of those have been terminated and they probably will never come back.

And so, there is one company that has figured out how to find another source for creating this shade of green that people are after.

Which is Voltarc in Connecticut.

Reformulation is very complicated. Our customers demand that when we specify a color match, our color does match.

None of it matches. There's some good drama.

The process for making coated neon sign tubing begins with glass washing. Once the glass is washed, it's transported to the coating department where it is up flush coated, meaning that the coating is pushed up from the bottom to the top and then allowed to drain out. The drying process is critical in getting the proper color, the proper lumens, the proper output. Once the glass is coated and dried, it's transported back to the lehring department. The lehr is a large chain-driven oven where the glass is loaded onto the chain. It goes through at a certain speed and at a certain temperature. The purpose of this lehr is to take the glass and of course bake out the coating.

Voltarc's been manufacturing sign products and neon lamps since 1927.

The reason why we continue to be able to make neon is because we have the ability to obtain the raw materials necessary. Over the years, many of these raw materials have been obsoleted and are no longer available. One of the things that happened was one of our key colors, cyan green, was discontinued.

It's the raw materials. These phosphors are mined products, okay? They're also, in a lot of cases, rare Earth products.

The demand for those phosphors for those colors, specifically cyan green, has diminished to the point that the manufacturer of it has determined that it was no longer cost-effective to make it. This initially was a shock because it is a basic color and it was also a base color for many other formulations.

We established some great names like Elephant's Foot. That was a kind of a very beautiful purple, believe it or not. The amount of colors, including the range of whites even, have been reduced.

So we've worked diligently to try and develop other phosphor blends that could replace it.

We're able to come back with what we call the triphosphor method.

Triband phosphors consists of red, blue, and green, primary colors. When assembled in equal parts, they appear as white. Any shift towards the red, the blue or the green will affect that color. Those colors can be walked down into purples, oranges, and so on and so forth. With tribands, the ratios are critical. The testing is critical. There's much more technology involved in trying to measure the color to make sure that the color is hitting the color target. They may have the mechanical properties, but the color's just not quite right.

Green is no longer the green that we've used. Green has more of a bluish green tint, and when we bend it, it thins out so much that you see blue at all the bends, which is the blue gas inside the argon and mercury mix that makes the green bright green. So none of it matches.

The reason why it's been so difficult to replace some of these colors is not so much for use in a new sign, you could get a piece of green tubing and it'll do the job. But if you look at the old style movie marquees where they had rows and rows and rows of colored neon, the color has to be an exact match, especially when it's an eye shot side by side with another piece.

It's not going to be the exact same thing as the original cyan green as far as the color, but the degradation on the cyan green was rather fast anyway.

There are people who are truest and I'm one of them. I like the original colors. I think the history behind them is so important. Rather than letting that go, we have to accept the fact that it is a changing market.

The future of neon, in my opinion, is pretty bleak. Almost all of Las Vegas has switched over to LED. Major signs on the top of buildings throughout the country are switching to LED. There is zero skill necessary to make an LED sign. A neon tube bender has got years of experience in designing and crafting glass.

The biggest difference with an LED sign versus a neon sign is that a neon sign takes time, it costs money.

A neon tube that lights up as a sign that you see out in the wild is a piece of glass that started out straight. Pricing on neon glass as raw material has changed so dramatically over my 40 years of doing this. When I had a production company in Central North Carolina, we would buy a tote of 12 or 15 millimeter glass. That's 2,000 pounds of glass in a tote. And I was buying it for 42 cents a pound. And now I shudder that I'm paying 2.99 a pound for clear glass.

You can't just lean in to the fire with a tube of glass and bend something up. You know, it takes a long time to develop the skill to do it.

To become a glass blower in neon tubing requires thousands of repetitions of the exact same thing in one diameter, then another diameter and another diameter. The cork or stopper can come flying out. Or worst case, you can burn yourself really badly, like, the kind of burns that stay with you your whole life.

You then connect this tube that you've made to an apparatus that vacuums out all of the oxygen. You then do what's called bombarding the tube, which is kind of like putting your oven in clean mode. You superheat the tube that you've made to turn any kind of impurity that's in it, and to burn it to a crisp.

You can allow the tube to cool back down and backfill it with either neon, argon, xenon, crypton, or helium, depending on what the design requires. So many things can go wrong. It's kind of a miracle that we continue to do it right, but it's all because of repetition.

The thing that's so sentimental about neon signs is that you know that they've been there. They're generational. You look at a movie marquee in front of your favorite theater and you could be pretty sure your parents and possibly your grandparents also would get that same marquee.

The high note for me in this world, in this changing world of my industry is that LED will never be as cool as neon.

Neon will never go away, especially in the film industry. They want things, the set to look original. They want the glow of the neon, and that's why we do so much hiring out of neon.

Ironically, the future of neon lies in the hands of relatively unskilled beginners who I am so happy that they're doing it.

There's a value for authenticity in our lives. And neon is very relevant to that debate, to that discussion. Even if you can't hear the slight little buzzing of this thing, or even if there's not a tube, you know, starting to flicker for whatever reason, on some level I think you're recognizing this as something that is connecting those points of light between what you saw in that noir film and what you read in Jack Kerouac and the old drugstore on Main Street of whatever town you grew up in.

Broadway, in New York. These places, they've had these enormous, amazing advertising fronts, haven't they?

I think the imprint that neon has made on American society, American culture, American history was the ability that we were able to do marvelous things. It's very nice to receive your information in the form of art. It's very easy to post a sign that gives you a message. But when it's in a form of art, multiple colors, multiple shapes, multiple styles, it's something that you remember.