[dramatic music playing]
[Nathaniel]
is to throw things away, to consume more and faster.
We're disconnected from where things come from,
and as such, we do not value what we have.
The more I learn about the solutions available to fight the climate crisis,
the more I realize that there is no easy panacea,
no single solution that is perfect,
that we're fighting the constant battle
between the resource intensive demands of our race,
and the limits of what this earth can handle.
I'm not here to claim to have or even know
the solutions, because I'm as overwhelmed
by the challenges that we face as anyone else.
But I do wanna tell a story, about the dangers of judgment
of the transformative power of learning
where things come from.
To tell this story,
I've teamed up with YouTube
for their Earth Day 2022 initiative,
and they've decided to send me to the last place
I ever thought I would go, to Las Vegas,
to see what I could find.
With the help of this journal, I'm gonna get information
on one specific spot, and learn how it connects
with a variety of fascinating pieces of history and science,
technology, and ecology.
YouTube has plans for me that I haven't been filled in on.
Whoa! The Neon Museum?
Seems very Vegas.
And how this is disconnected to Earth Day
is entirely unclear to me.
However, helping me along the way
is the one and only Jake Roper from YouTube's Vsauce3.
When things get complicated, he can help us
better understand the science at work.
In fact, I'm gonna give him a call right now.
[cell phone ringing]
-Hey, Jake.
What is up, my dude? How is Sin City treating you?
[chuckles]
Um, it's been quite the experience, honestly.
I have not yet lost my life-savings.
So, I consider that a victory lap.
But I would love to get a little bit more clarity
on what the story is with Earth Day and Las Vegas.
I'm not fully understanding the connection right now.
Yup. I get you.
It's definitely not under your nose,
but it's kind of all around you.
You see all that neon on the streets, the signs?
-Yeah? So, there's a bit of magic in them lights.
And that's what you're going to go figure out,
because YouTube wants you to check out
The Neon Museum.
-[Nathaniel]
And, guess what?
There's even more to it than just neon.
YouTube says there are cool things
like the Hoover Dam, the Nobel Prize,
Edison of France,
and a 50-foot kicking cowgirl.
That is a lot of different things.
And I'm very curious how they all connect.
Yeah, dude. Well, good luck in Vegas, Nathaniel.
Thank you, man. I appreciate it.
The first place YouTube sent me was to go see
a gigantic neon sign under maintenance
in the lobby of the Circa Hotel & Casino.
All right. I'm now in the belly of the beast.
This is very impressive.
Wow. Look at the size of that.
It's something else, right?
[Nathaniel] It is enormous. Next to you, it is humongous.
The first thing that struck me was that these signs
are actually pieces of art.
I've never seen one up close before.
This sign in particular is of a character called
Vegas Vickie, who used to live on Fremont Street.
And instead of getting demolished after 37 years,
was saved and repaired by the neon sign company Yesco.
She lives a new life in the lobby of this hotel.
But the wonderful thing, and the challenge with neon,
is that it is a craft which requires a lot more time to master.
[Jeffrey] But we're still doing basically the same technology
that--that was-- made a neon tube light up--
-[Nathaniel] Mm-hmm. ---in the 1920's and 1930's.
-[Nathaniel] Very cool. -So this, this unit of glass represents a lot of history.
Yeah, and the results are very impressive.
-[Jeffrey] Yeah, thank you. -[Nathaniel] Yeah.
So does this--I'm imagining this thing turns on?
Do you wanna give us a hand in fixing Vegas Vickie?
Yeah, I'd love to.
Oh, wow, this wobbles a lot.
[Jeffrey] It does.
We're about 25 feet up in the air
about to repair a gigantic...
neon sign indoors.
[Jeffrey] He's gonna be pressing the neon tube
-into the PK housings. -[Nathaniel] Okay. All right.
[Jeffrey] So when we push those in the stands, it connects,
uh, the--each end of the tube to a copper, uh, copper bushing.
[Nathaniel] Perfect.
All right. Let's do this thing.
[Jeffrey] Okay.
-[Nathaniel] Oh, wow. -[Jeffrey] There we go.
[Nathaniel] Wow.
-[Jeffrey] There we go. -[Nathaniel] That's amazing.
Okay. So it's working.
The piece that we just added is working.
Excellent.
Excellent work, boys.
So I'm hearing a lot about how this is energy efficient.
[Jeffrey] This is only drawing just a,
a small little bit of amperage.
Hey, Nathaniel, I've got an energetic demonstration
to get to the bottom of how much power
these various lights consume.
It might surprise you to learn that neon lights,
and gas discharge lights in general,
are actually pretty efficient.
Here we have an LED, a gas discharge light,
and an incandescent bulb.
And here I have a stationary exercise bike
hooked up to an electrical generator.
We'll take a look at how much leg power
a person has to generate
to get each of these to illuminate.
Once our cyclist gets going a little bit,
we see that they only have to put out 13.5 watts
of power to get the LED to illuminate.
And once they pick up the pace a bit,
23 watts gets our neon,
well, gas discharge bulb, to shine.
And with a lot more effort, the incandescent bulb glows
with 100 watts of power.
A neon light only consumes about one-fourth of the power
of a comparable incandescent light.
You realize where the power is coming from,
it's coming from Hoover Dam.
[Nathaniel]
is that there are always things to be learned
in the places people don't look.
Human ingenuity and creativity thrive
in the presence of limitations.
And somewhere in this rock and sand, I'm told,
is an amazing feat of human engineering
from almost a century ago.
All right. Here we are.
Ooh.
Wow.
There. Look at that.
That's me zoomed in. I mean, just look
at the size of this place.
[curious music]
Look at the architecture down there, as well.
Holy cow.
I can't even imagine what it took to build this.
Those white lines out there,
that shows how low the water has dropped,
which is a bit alarming.
So, the water used to be up to the point
of where that white ends,
and it has clearly fallen quite a ways.
Even industrial wonders like Hoover Dam
are getting threatened by the droughts
that we're seeing due to climate change.
But first of all, how does this work?
Fortunately, Jake can break this down
in a way that's easy to understand.
[grunts] So, fundamentally, a hydroelectric power plant
is a way to turn the gravitational potential energy
of water in a river into electrical energy.
Utilizing a natural resource,
in this case the Colorado River,
allows us to harness a gargantuan amount of energy.
How did we do it?
With water, gravity, and a generator.
The water in this upper tank has what's called
"gravitational potential energy".
Now, if we allow that kinetic energy to spin a turbine
inside a generator, we get electrical energy.
And where does that power go?
Well, Vegas, baby.
[Nathaniel]
And while virtually no source of energy generation is perfect,
it's a much greener option compared to other alternatives.
And it turns out that there are many creative ways that water can be used.
[Jake]
of energy using water.
In general, when traditional power grids produce more energy
than they need,
there is no place to store this energy.
But in Virginia, there are two lakes
with different elevations that can do just that.
But how did they do it?
By using a low tech pump storage facility.
They take the unused energy from the grid
and use it to pump water from a lower elevation
to a higher elevation,
giving the lake at the higher elevation
gravitational potential energy.
Then when they need that energy,
the water flows downhill again
and runs through a generator creating power,
and around we go indefinitely,
making this lake the world's largest battery.
[Nathaniel]
I thought about the kind of crazy ambition it took
not just to build a dam
but also how a multibillion dollar industry
rose up out of the desert
to be the biggest gambling destination in the world.
So, I'm heading to The Neon Museum right now
to meet Dydia and Paul, who are historians in all things Las Vegas.
-I'm Dydia Delyser. -[Paul] Paul.
-[Nathaniel] Paul. Nice to meet you. -[Paul] Pleasure.
Okay. I'm--I'm on a little bit of, uh,
an investigative mission here to understand
the link between the dam
and the neon lights, and I hear that you guys
-have some of the answers. -Maybe we can help.
So they began building the dam in the early '30s.
Remember, that's the Depression in the United States.
So, the worst years of the Depression, they're building a dam.
That meant there were a lot of jobs here at a bad time,
and there were a lot of young men
doing these heavy labor jobs, making good money.
They had their days off with money in their pockets.
They're working way out in the desert on the dam.
There's no other place to go.
They come here on their days off.
So what do they wanna do with money in their pockets?
Well, they may be drinking.
-[Paul] Not true. -They--
-Hey, you don't remember? -No, I don't remember.
You don't remember? That's because you did it too much.
Oh, God.
You know, the Hoover Dam
was built for projected need,
said if these communities, Phoenix, Tucson,
Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas,
all these places need to grow,
we need to have a good source of electricity.
[Nathaniel]
-to all of these places?
So, in a town like Las Vegas,
you had more bars
than you would have for the population
-if it was a sedentary population. -Right.
And then it lends itself so well to neon
because we're in the desert.
And if you light up a big neon sign on a tower here,
neon has great penetration at night,
and you could ride your horse over the ridge.
And as soon as you come into this huge valley,
you could see that neon sign from a great, great distance.
-Right. -So neon drew people and made Las Vegas a destination.
[Nathaniel]
that grew out of the need to create an energy source
for America's growing West Coast.
And utilizing a natural resource like the Colorado River
to power a city definitely beats using fossil fuels.
This, by the way, came about at a time
where hardly anyone was thinking about climate change.
Neon seemed to be right at the cross-section
of energy usage and culture.
But I wanted to better understand
where it comes from and what makes it special.
I'm wondering if you could explain a little bit
as to, like, how this works.
[Stephen] So, when people think about Las Vegas,
chances are pretty good
on the list of things they think about, neon signs.
Absolutely. It's not even just like
a thing you think about. It's like the mental image
-that you have of the place. -Yeah.
-You could almost hear the neon, like, zapping away. -Yeah.
-[neon sign zapping] -[Stephen] But if you want the full story,
we have to go back a little bit farther.
Let's take it all the way back to a gentleman
-named Sir William Ramsay.
[Stephen]
and that was discovering these gases called noble gases.
And these noble gases are so-called
because they're amazingly stable and non-reactive.
-[Nathaniel]
key to all sorts of great, uh, lighting uses.
When we take a look at the work that Ramsay did,
this discovery of these noble gases was super important,
it was so important that he actually won
the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1904.
Oh, wow. Okay. This was a big deal.
This was a big deal, right?
Uh, so while he was working on that,
-other people were working in the field of gases, right? -[Nathaniel] Okay.
So, at one point, there was a scientist,
the French Thomas Edison, Georges Claude,
-had all this extra neon gas on hand...
[Stephen]
So he decided to take this extra gas
and put it into a clear glass tube.
-[Nathaniel]
electricity to that, uh, neon gas,
and it started to glow this brilliant red.
Eventually, neon made its way to Las Vegas, right?
And you'll see neon became sort of a part of our vernacular here.
[Nathaniel]
[Stephen]
And we actually have signs here that date back to that time.
And if you're looking at a sustainable way to light,
neon's your answer.
Those innovations from Claude
have continued to shine for over a century.
But what's really going on inside those tubes
that enchant and intrigue us with their glorious light?
It's actually quite simple.
To start the festivities,
we have a neon salesman sample suitcase.
If we apply a large voltage between the two electrodes
at either end of a tube full of gas,
that voltage knocks electrons free from their atoms,
which leaves us with negatively charged electrons
and positively charged ions.
Now, welcome to our little atomic dance party.
Opposites attract and those positive ions
and negative electrons are attracted
to the opposite charge on either end of the tube,
and as ions and electrons fly past each other,
they collide and hook up again releasing energy
and little packets of lights called "photons".
Oh, yeah, get your funk on, neon.
[Nathaniel]
the penetration of neon's glow
and how it drew people to Vegas.
There's like a magnetic quality to it.
And like that glow, neon seems to have touched
so many aspects of our lives whether we know it or not.
This is a really impressive space.
In a society that seems so quick to throw things out,
it's pretty cool that our love of neon has such longevity.
And this company, Yesco, is almost as old as neon itself,
and it's keeping the lost art of making neon signs alive and well.
Welcome to the epicenter of sign--sign-making.
[Nathaniel] All right. Well, I'm curious where all the neon magic happens.
Well, you know, I wanna show you
and--and maybe you could try your hand at some of this.
-I would love to. -I'd like to introduce you to Eric.
Eric has a long history of neon tube bending.
And he's gonna show you the how-tos.
I'll just follow the instructions, and hopefully nothing explodes.
-Or actually, does that happen? -Yeah, the tube's, uh,
negative--slightly negative zero atmosphere.
Okay. You're already starting to use terminology that I don't know. I don't know.
All right. First thing I'm gonna do is, uh, show you how to blend glass.
-Okay. -And you're gonna put this around your neck.
Around my neck?
I got to say, I was not expecting to actually make one of these signs,
but it has quickly become clear to me that the people
that live in this neon world are true artists.
[Eric] Ninety and then blow.
Keep going. Keep going.
[Nathaniel]
such as beauty with this kind of craftsmanship...
[Eric] Come over here and lay it on that screen.
...I will never look at a neon sign in the same way again.
From a technique standpoint, what grade do you give me?
Uh, C-plus.
-Wow. Hey, for a first attempt-- -Yeah.
Yeah, for a first attempt? Yeah.
All right. This is stage two.
-Step back and I'll-- -[Nathaniel] Are we good to go?
--put some gas in this thing.
Step back as in, like, this could explode?
[Eric] No, no. It's not gonna explode. I promise you.
-So what happens now? -[Eric] It's gonna light up.
[Nathaniel] Really? Oh, my God. Wow.
-I love it. -[Eric] Yeah.
[Nathaniel]
I reflected for a moment on how all of my preconceived notions
about this place, and the technology they use, was crumbling before me.
[upbeat music]
I came to Las Vegas with a fair amount of judgment, honestly.
Uh, I'm--I'm not proud of it,
but what I've come to discover in my time here
is that there are so many incredible stories here
of culture and art, and artisanship.
We're faced with some major challenges
and only have imperfect solutions.
And apart from meeting some incredible people
in the place I never expected to go,
I came to realize how connected and human the universe with neon really is,
and how it links this cool museum to Hoover Dam,
Nobel Prize, Edison of France,
and a 50-foot kicking cowgirl named Vickie.
The energy crisis we face
is one of the major challenges of our time.
It's hard to know even where to begin,
and I won't pretend to have the answers on how to fix things,
as the solutions that we currently have are imperfect.
But this whole adventure did feel like a little reminder to me
that maybe we shouldn't rush to throw away some of the technologies
we've created in the name of progress.
Learning where things come from
changes how we treat our environment
and the way that we consider it.
What if the answer to today's problems
are some miraculous new technology,
but rather a deeper relationship with the world around us,
and the things that we already have?