Georges Claude (24 September 1870-23 May 1960) was a French engineer and inventor. He is noted for his early work on the industrial liquefaction of air, for the invention and commercialization of neon lighting, and for a large experiment on generating energy by pumping cold seawater up from the depths. He has been considered by some to be the Edison of France.
Claude was an active collaborator with the German occupiers of France during the Second World War, for which he was imprisoned in 1945 and stripped of his honours.
Georges Claude was born on 24 September 1870 in Paris, France, during the city's siege by German forces.
Georges Claude studied at the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI). He then held several positions. He was an electrical inspector in a cable factory and the laboratory manager in an electric works. He founded and edited a magazine, L'Étincelle Électrique; his important friendship with Jacques-Arsène d'Arsonval apparently dates from this time.
About 1896, Claude learned of the explosion risk for bottled acetylene, which was used at the time for lighting. Acetylene is explosive when stored under pressure. Claude showed that acetylene dissolved well in acetone, equivalent to storing it under 25 atmospheres of pressure, reduced the risk in handling the gas.
In 1902, Claude devised what is now known as the Claude system for liquifying air. The system enabled the production of industrial quantities of liquid nitrogen, oxygen, and argon; Claude's approach competed successfully with the earlier system of Carl von Linde (1895).
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Claude and businessman Paul Delorme founded L'Air Liquide, S.A., which is presently a large multinational corporation headquartered in Paris, France.
Inspired by Geissler tubes and by Daniel McFarlan Moore's invention of a nitrogen-based light, the Moore tube, Claude developed neon tube lighting to exploit the neon that was produced as a byproduct of his air liquefaction business. These were all glow discharge tubes that generate light when an electric current is passed through the rarefied gas within the tube.
Claude's first public demonstration of a large neon light was at the Paris Motor Show (Salon de l'Automobile et du Cycle), 3-18 December 1910.
Claude's first patent filing for his technologies in France was on 7 March 1910.
Claude himself wrote in 1913 that, in addition to a source of neon gas, there were two principal inventions that made neon lighting practicable. First were his methods for purifying the neon or other inert gases such as argon.
The second invention was ultimately crucial for
the development of the Claude lighting business; it was a design for minimizing the degradation by sputtering of the electrodes that transfer electric current from the external power supply to the glowing gases within the sign.
The terms neon light and neon sign are now often applied to electrical lighting incorporating sealed glass tubes filled with argon, mercury vapour, or other gases, in addition to neon.
Neon lighting consists of brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases.
Neon lights are a type of cold cathode gas-discharge light.
A neon tube is a sealed glass tube with a metal electrode at each end, filled with one of a number of gases at low pressure. A high potential of several thousand volts applied to the electrodes ionizes the gas in the tube, causing it to emit coloured light.
The colour of the light depends on the gas in the tube. Neon lights were named for neon, a noble gas which gives off a popular orange light, but other gases and chemicals are used to produce other colours, such as hydrogen (red), helium (yellow), carbon dioxide (white), and mercury (blue).
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Neon tubes can be fabricated in curving artistic shapes, to form letters or pictures. They are mainly used to make dramatic, multicoloured glowing signage for advertising, called neon signs, which were popular from the 1920s to 1960s and again in the 1980s.
The term can also refer to the miniature neon glow lamp, developed in 1917, about seven years after neon tube lighting. While neon tube lights are typically meters long, the neon lamps can be less than one centimetre in length and glow much more dimly than the tube lights. They are still in use as small indicator lights.
Through the 1970s, neon glow lamps were widely used for numerical displays in electronics, for small decorative lamps, and as signal processing devices in circuity. While these lamps are now antiques, the technology of the neon glow lamp developed into contemporary plasma displays and televisions.
Neon was discovered in 1898 by the British scientists William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers. After obtaining pure neon from the atmosphere, they explored its properties using an electrical gas-discharge tube that was similar to the tubes used for neon signs today.
Neon lighting was an important cultural phenomenon in the United States in that era; by 1940, the downtowns of nearly every city in the US were bright with neon signage, and Times Square in New York City was known worldwide for its neon extravagances.
There were 2000 shops nationwide designing and fabricating neon signs. The popularity, intricacy, and scale of neon signage for advertising declined in the U.S. following the Second World War (1939-1945), but development continued vigorously in Japan, Iran, and some other countries. In recent decades, architects and artists, in addition to sign designers, have again adopted neon tube lighting as a component in their works.
Neon lighting is closely related to fluorescent lighting, which developed about 25 years after neon tube lighting. In fluorescent lights, the light emitted by rarefied gases within a tube is used exclusively to excite fluorescent materials that coat the tube, which then shine with their own colours that become the tube's visible, usually white, glow. Fluorescent coatings and glasses are also an option for neon tube lighting, but are often selected to obtain bright colours.
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but lost most of it in the 1930s with hair brained schemes
to make electricity using the temperature difference
between the top of the ocean and its icy depths.
He almost ended his career, imprisoned for life.
Bill Hammack
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