100 years of neon - in pictures

Cars pass hotels on Ocean Drive, Miami at dusk. When Neon was first used in America in 1923, it marked the site of a Packard car dealership in automobile addicted Los Angeles. It is now ubiquitous in every American city
Photograph: Ian Cumming/Getty Images

Neon sign enthusiast Kirsten Hively has been documenting New York's signs on her blog Project Neon since last year. One of her finds is The Heartbreak Bar "in bleeding red neon; a shadowy den in which you can doctor your misery with a drink" Photograph: Kirsten Hively

Russ & Daughters, a family catering in New York: "Either side of the salmon-pink subheading APPETIZERS two aquamarine neon fish frolic, diving towards the door as if anxious to be killed, sold and eaten" Photograph: Kirsten Hively

City Island Lobster House, another "treasure" from Kirsten Hively's blog Photograph: Kirsten Hively

A man works under a neon sign surrounded by salami advertising the mail order department of Katz's Delicatessen on the Lower East Side of Manhattan Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

A 1939 photomontage of Broadway's neon signs. Thanks to Edison, electricity had already turned Broadway into "the Great White Way". Neon made that description seem anaemic Photograph: Keystone/Getty

Neon signs in Times Square, New York in 1955. They seem tame compared with today's LED panels on the sides of the square's skyscrapers which have transformed it into "an alfresco, interactive television studio" Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Camel cigarette sign above a cafeteria on Broadway in New York City. "The neon signs advertising cigarettes, which back then were not thought to be toxic, now look mildly sleazy" Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

A marquee outside Astor Theater promoting Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound. Broadway was so awash with neon that journalist Meyer Berger renamed it "the Rainbow Ravine" Photograph: Andreas Feininger/LIFE

Britain also charmed by neon. By the 1950s Piccadilly Circus glowed with multicolour lights Photograph: Rex Features

The Moulin Rouge in Paris during the 1960s Photograph: Leonard de Raemy/Sygma/Corbis

Fremont Street, Las Vegas, now the mecca of neon signs Photograph: Fridmar Damm/Corbis

Neon signs welcome people to Reno, Nevada Photograph: William Whitehurst/Corbis

The Bates Motel in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). "A neon sign, smeared by rain as if seen through tears, beckons Janet Leigh to her doom" Photograph: PR

In Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) James Stewart and Kim Novak "embrace in a luminous fog breathed out by the neon sign clamped to the window; green here is the colour of decay, the sickly exhalation from a tomb" Photograph: PR

The principal characters in Hitchcock's Rope (1948) bathed in neon light Photograph: PR

Tom Waits in a scene from Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart (1982) where neon "saturates the air of Las Vegas with sensation" Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Neon has become a favourite medium for many visual artists in recent decades. Here Tracey Emin poses with her artworks that "confide the sodden regrets of the disillusioned morning after" Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

Munson Diner #3, 1997, by Robert Gniewek. Photorealist painter Gniewek captures American roadside culture from the late 1940s and early 1950s bathed in neon light Photograph: Louis K. Meisel Gallery, Inc./Corbis

Bruce Nauman's Run from Fear, Fun from Rear, 1972, on display in Miami. Nauman is fascinated by language and often employs neon to explore its potential Photograph: Jean Baptiste Lacroix/WireImage

Bruce Nauman's Five Marching Men, 1985, on display in Berlin Photograph: Tobias Kleinschmidt/Corbis

A neon sign made exclusively for the Observer New Review by Chris Bracey of godsownjunkyard.co.uk Photograph: Michael Whitaker