A diner sign: hand-bent glass tube filled with neon, which glows red-orange, or argon with phosphor coatings for the other colours, mounted on a dark wall. Georges Claude showed the first tubes in Paris in 1910; by 1940 some two thousand American shops were bending glass.
A tube is one continuous stroke of uniform width, so the drawing has to be a single line, and the unlit jumper segments that carry current between letters are blacked out. The glow is the medium: a halo, a coloured tube and a white-hot core. Plastic and then LED signs replaced it from the 1960s.
The figure becomes an outline silhouette and is stroked four times: a wide halo, a glow, the glass tube and a thin white core, with lighter compositing so overlaps bloom. A hashed flicker dims a segment now and then. The script name is a web font the plate waits for.