99% Invisible - 193- Tube Benders

Episode Date: December 16, 2015

The skyline of beautiful downtown Oakland, California, is defined by various towers by day, but at night there is one that shines far more brightly than the rest: the neon-illuminated Tribune Tower. Each side of the tower says “Tribune” in … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Downtown Oakland, where we work, is beautiful. But it doesn't cut a very distinct skyline. Sure, they're the cranes down by the port, and those are pretty famous. But in terms of downtown Oakland proper, there's pretty much just one building that defines the nighttime skyline. The Tribune Tower. It used to be the headquarters of the newspaper, the Oakland Tribune. The paper moved up the street, so now the tower is an office building. That's producer Avery Truffleman. The Tribune Tower, which happens to be right by our office, was the tallest building in

Oakland in the 1920s. It's a 22 story tower, topped with a copper coated, pitched, man-sered roof, and a sandy brick exterior. It's a really unique architecture, but that is not why it's the most distinctive building in Oakland. It's famous because it says Tribune in gigantic orange-red neon letters on all four sides of the building, and each side has a neon clock with neon hands. And it's always on every night, never flickering, rarely as a letter out. Because the Tribune neon has a secret weapon, on the top, top floor of the tower. Take the elevator to the 20th floor.

There you'll see a door. Restricted area limited access. And there's a flight of narrow stairs. Up the stairs, you'll find a man. John? Hi. Hey there. John Law, the keeper of the neon.

We are on the 22nd floor of the Oakland Tribune Tower. I have a tiny office space in one corner and the current owners, I have a wonderful arrangement with them and you know we rent the place from them and I keep there's neon signs going. By trade John Law is a sign installer and maintainer and he is the one that keeps the Tribune Tower neon blazing. Nowadays a wrap around neon clock on the 20th floor of a building is fairly rare. There were more in the 30s and 40s. They built a lot more buildings with the signage on them in the end. They're almost all gone.

The Tribune neon, like many, many neon signs, has had periods of darkness and neglect. Most signs of this size have been allowed to flicker out and die. But thanks to John and the owner of the tower, the Tribune Neon, after a period of neglect, has been inconsistently since the late 90s, and this is no small feat. This is back of one of the four clock, so watch your head. John can repair some of the Neon from within the tower. But if I have to get out on the face and work on the Neon, on the letters, I have to clip into, I have a full body harness, and kind of step onto the face of the tower. But if I have to get out on the face and work on the neon on the letters, I have to clip in, I have a full body harness and kind of step onto the face of the letter. We would put hanging over a drop.

A drop of something like 300 feet. But John loves heights. And he loves neon. There's nothing like neon. I mean, other light sources, they don't have that kind of fuzzy, otherworldly look to it that you get with neon. And neon signage, you know, can be very beautiful. And a lot of people in the past have considered to be cheesy and ugly

and representative of some dying commercialism that they found unpleasant. People like philosophers, essayists, writing critiques of late capitalism, they use neon as a metaphor to express their distaste for the neon hell that we all live in. Christoph Rabat is the author of Flickering Light, a history of neon. And I teach American studies at the University of Patabong in Germany. For Professor Rabat to study neon, it's to study America.

A blinking in the night in some American diner. That's just something if you're coming from a European background, it has a really kind of aesthetic power to it. It is a great metaphor of American culture, even though it's not an American product, per se. The gas neon was discovered in 1898 by a British scientist named Sir William Ramsey. It was a new gas, so we named it for the Greek neos, meaning new. Ramsey realized that if he ran electricity through this new gas, it would burn bright, bright orangey red. But he basically said, oh, that's cool, and then forgot about it, moving on to find other gases and ultimately win a Nobel Prize.

But neon lights, as we know them, were made and popularized by another chemist. It was this Frenchman, and he played around with these neon tubes. And it was a pretty good businessman and thought, well, we could do something with this. A Frenchman named George Claude made his first neon lights in 1910. And he eventually quit chemistry to start a business called Claude Neon. It was the first to sell this new lighting for decor and for advertising. The first Neon signs were up in Paris. Gabarbyshop was the first shop ever to have a Neon sign,

and then it really spread around the city of Paris. And from Paris, then it spread around the world. George Claude may have been the father of Neon lights, but he was not a good guy. Well, you know, it's hard to follow love with him. He turned to an ardent follower of Nazi Germany, a great businessman, but also doubtful morals. But Neon swept the United States. It was brighter and more efficient than incandescent lighting, and Americans were giddy with it. By 1924, the company Claude Neon

had franchises in 14 major cities across the country. By the 1930s, there were 20,000 Neon advertisements in Manhattan and Brooklyn, most of them, made by Claude Neon. Neon signs were the embodiment of prosperity, so Neon was on respectable upscale spots, like movie palace marques and opera houses, you know, nice places. So it started with the churches and the and the four stories and the Cardiola ships, you know, institutions that signified the luxury. Neon became the symbol of life in the big city. In the late 40s, Peggy Lee, you know, sing her in those days, she had a song. It was really the Sniyan enthusiasm of that period.

But the initial excitement fades, the popularity of downtown wanes. People move to the suburbs, the cities grow dark, the neon flickers. Years later, 10, 20 years down the road, then it was like more cheap bars, cheap hotels, and then it had this city quality to it. And then by and by, I'm trying to do this metaphor of people who, you know, more or less critiqued the loneliness in society. There's a lot of country in Western. Science that I always have someone getting drunk by the neon sign. There's a neon light at the end of the tone.

And suddenly neon, which used to be a sign of luxury, turns into a symbol of poverty and a rundown city. Neon is also hard to maintain, and a broken Neon sign is a bright, flashing sign of brokenness. And that's why it became the symbol of decay. If Neon tubes are made well, they can last about 30 years, sometimes up to 70, but they are a glass, so they can break, and they're out there in the elements, so the electricity can flicker out.

When a neon sign goes out, you can't just screw in a new tube or order up a cheap replacement. You would think that it was like a machine-made product, right? That there was some sort of big neon factory that just turned out neon on an assembly line. And that's really not the case. It's really craftsmen who shaped these signs. They've been the tubes with their hands. And it's really just one person doing this. A person like Shana Peterson.

A neon glass blower is not a glass blower. It's really called neon tube bending. That's the trade. We're two benders. Shawna Peterson has been bending since 1987. She says color is a good way to code these signs, to know what's inside of them, and what quality they are. Red neon lights are the most basic and the most popular. And that's like a reddish orange, and that's the standard neon red. That is pure neon

gas. It just naturally burns that color. And then there's blue neon, also pretty basic. The cool secret about blue neon is that it's not actually neon gas. It's argon gas right in with a little mercury, but we still call them neon signs. And for a while, almost all neon signs were just red and blue. Pure neon or argon mercury in clear tubes. Then the industry came up with a way to make any color you want. There's a phosphor powder coating on it inside of the tubes. Benders can use tubes with different phosphors on the inside of the tubes to create more colors than just red and blue. Use a few, use a green, a lime green, go for a lime green, you know, use of color, done well, it's nice. Now just to be clear, those neon beer signs at the

bodega, or those standard open signs, can be, and often are, made on a massive scale in China. Those are still hand-blown, that's the only way to make neon. But that's like one person makes only the letter E all day long. Another person makes only O's. And these signs are lower quality. Cheap signs for beer brands or generic open signs are often colored with a coating of color plastic on the outside of the glass tubes. Usually it's so cheap you can chip it off with your fingernail. But if you're looking at a sign over your local bar or hotel or sometimes even a neon

sign over a chain store, if it's large and you haven't seen it anywhere else, it was probably painstakingly crafted, probably locally. Neon 2 benders get glass from the manufacturer in 4 foot long tubes and they draw out a pattern for how they bend and fuse it. You're bending the word apple, you never start with A. You have to map out in your mind where those curves are and how they're going to change direction and generally you're going to start somewhere in the center of that word

and work your way out. And Shawna has a number of different burners and tools to manipulate the tubes. To bend a curve, so hold the glass tube on either end over an open flame burner. When I'm using it, it sounds like this. Shana has only a few seconds to bend the glass into a perfect shape before it hardens up again, so she has to act quickly and precisely.

Sneezing is a tube ender's nightmare. Then Shana processes the bent tubes with a machine called a bimbarder. It's this whole process where she heats up the tubes really, really hot and vacuums out the impurities before filling the tubes with neon or argon mercury and fuses the electrical source to them. That include summary is the craft. It's expensive, it's difficult, and there aren't that many people who can make neon

signs. And that is why. When they break, they usually get replaced with LEDs. LEDs is so much cheaper, and people in the LED industry would tell you it's so much brighter as well. Randall Ann Homan and Al Barna are the publishers and photographers of a book called San Francisco neon, Survivors and Lost icons. All of these signs are part of our cultural heritage

in San Francisco and their treasures, and we need to hang onto them. Randall and Al lead tours of some of their favorite neon around the city. Let's stop here. Many of the signs are defunct or hangover businesses that they're no longer affiliated with. All right, so this is my very favorite sign.

This Art Deco peacock has no fewer than 17 concentric circles of neon and it's really a feat of tube-ending. Now, the business is long gone. It's kind of a miracle that it's still here. San Francisco was once covered in neon. Look at an old picture of Market Street from the 1950s and you'll see it looks like the Vegas Strip, all a glow with flashing lights. Then, in the 60s, there was a campaign to get rid of all that flash and beautify that

part of town, and almost all those neon signs were removed. And around the rest of the city, pretty regularly, stops on Randall and Al's neon tour will just vanish. Yeah, it's embarrassing and awkward to bring a tour group around the corner to talk about a sign that doesn't exist anymore. It kind of illustrates the nature of neon signs. If you're interested in photographing them or painting them, do it as quick as you can because they can disappear overnight.

And it's not just San Francisco. New York also went from having tens of thousands of signs in the 1970s to just a couple hundred today. Hong Kong is losing a lot of its spectacular neon displays. Signs change with their cities. But in some spheres, neon is having a little revival. The few neon benders around are getting a lot of business from high-end restaurants and hotels, companies who aren't quotes illuminated on their walls, or artists who are commissioning neon pieces.

Now a custom neon sign represents an emphasis on craftsmanship and style, tinged with a bit of nostalgia, ensure this all sounds very artisanal and stuff, but this might just be the way that neon craft survives. At its core, the ingredients are simple, glass, electricity, and gas from the air we breathe. And the results bend into something spectacular. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Trouffleman with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Kirk Colstad, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Jim Rizzo of Neon Works in Oakland and Tom Downs, author of Walking

San Francisco. Randall and Al's photography book, San Francisco Neon, Survivors, and Lost Icons is now in its third printing. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-LW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxan, an architecture and interior's firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify, but you can listen to every single episode of 99% Invisible at 99pi.org.