We don’t just make signs. We love them.

Chalk and paint

Before electricity, a sign was made by hand. Sign writers painted shopfronts and windows in enamel and gold leaf, and cafés, pubs and grocers wrote the day’s specials on slate in chalk. A chalkboard said something no printed sign could: somebody here wrote this today.

It’s still the most trusted look on a café counter, which is why we start there.

Bulbs and marquees

When electric light arrived, theatres wrapped their entrances in it. Rows of bare bulbs ran round the marquee and chased each other in a loop, and whole streets of them earned Broadway its nickname, the Great White Way. A wall of bulbs meant one thing: something is happening here tonight.

Neon

In 1910 Georges Claude showed glass tubes of glowing neon gas in Paris, and within a few years glass benders were turning them into words. By the 1920s neon had crossed the Atlantic, and for the next forty years it was the light of diners, motels, bars and cinemas.

Neon doesn’t just switch on. It stutters, catches, and settles into a hum.

Station clocks

Railway stations ran on time and showed it. Above the entrance to Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station hangs a row of clock faces, each showing when the next train leaves on its line, and “meet me under the clocks” became the city’s way of saying where.

A dial gives you the time before you’ve read a single word, which is why a row of them still feels like somewhere you’re about to leave from.

The ground board

At football and cricket grounds the score was kept by people inside the scoreboard, hanging painted numbers on hooks and taking them down again. Later came boards of bulbs, then electronic ones.

Ask anyone at a local club about their old scoreboard and they’ll tell you exactly where it stood.

The news zipper

In 1928 the New York Times wrapped its building in Times Square with a ribbon of light bulbs, and the day’s headlines ran round it letter by letter. Crowds stood in the square to read the news as it moved.

It’s the grandfather of every scrolling sign since.

Jukebox bubble tubes

After the war, Wurlitzer’s model 1015 lit up milk bars and diners with bubbling coloured tubes and an arch of glowing plastic. It became the shape everyone draws when they draw a jukebox.

You didn’t have to put a coin in to feel it. The bubbles rising through the light told you the place was open and there’d be music.

Split-flap

In the 1950s an Italian company, Solari of Udine, turned a clock into a board of flaps that flipped to any letter. It went up in railway stations and airports around the world, and the sound of a whole board changing at once became the sound of going somewhere.

Most of those boards have gone now. People still stop when they hear one.

Nixie tubes

In 1955 Burroughs gave its glowing number tubes a name: Nixies. Ten wire digits sit stacked inside a glass tube of neon gas, and each one glows orange when its turn comes, with the others faint behind it.

They counted on lab instruments, lift panels and early computers. People still build clocks from old ones, because nothing else glows quite like them.

Flip-dots and vanes

Flip-dot boards are made of small discs, one colour on one side and black on the other, turned over by a magnet. Vane displays do the same with the bars of each number. They showed up on scoreboards, the front of buses and the price poles of petrol stations, and when a message changes they ripple across with a soft rattle.

VFD displays

Vacuum fluorescent displays arrived in the late 1960s and glowed blue-green on cash registers, petrol pumps, video recorders and car dashboards for the next thirty years.

If you’ve ever watched a till count up your total, you know the colour.

Teletext

In 1974 the BBC started Ceefax: pages of news, sport and weather sent inside the TV signal, typed in eight colours on a grid of 40 by 25, with pictures made from little blocks. Australia had its own on Channel Seven.

You typed in a page number and waited for it to come round. It was the internet before the internet, and it looked like nothing else.

LED dots and arcade screens

By the 1980s, rows of red and amber light-emitting diodes ran across shop windows, train platforms and taxi ranks, spelling out messages in chunky dot letters, while the arcade next door glowed with games drawn in big square pixels.

It’s the look of a late-night kebab shop, an arcade, a platform at 11 pm.

The first flat screens

In the 2000s the flat screen arrived. Plasma and LCD screens went up in banks, airports, shop windows and food courts, playing slideshows that faded from one picture to the next, dressed in the glossy, glassy look of the computers of the day.

And the news kept a ticker running along the bottom of the screen, which never really left.

The digital menu board

In the 2010s screens got cheap and the menu went digital. Fast-food counters swapped their lightboxes for rows of screens, prices changed without a ladder, photos slid in and out, and exchange counters put live rates up for everyone to see.

For the first time a sign could change itself: breakfast at seven, lunch at eleven, sold out by two.

Every one of them, behind any TV

Every one of these used to mean buying the real thing: a sign writer, a glass bender, a board shipped from Italy, a truck and an electrician. Today they all run on the same small stick behind a TV, and you can change your mind on a Tuesday afternoon.