Chapel, 1898 - Madison Square Garden, New York.

Beautiful "Moore Tubes", filled with carbon dioxide. While inferior to the high-efficiency phosphors available today, in 1898 this installation was state of the art! The Smithsonian in Washington, DC has a Moore tube on display. The tubes are approx 2in in diameter, and the carbon dioxide glow is a surprisingly agreeable white color - quite beautiful in their own right.

Moore tubes actually consumed CO2 as they operated, so a complicated mechanism was designed to continuously replenish the tube fill. Inert gases (argon, neon, helium, etc.) rendered the troublesome Moore tubes obsolete.