Sir William Crookes was a British chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London, and worked on spectroscopy.
47 Facts About William Crookes
2.
William Crookes was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube which was made in 1875.
3.
William Crookes is credited with discovering the element thallium, announced in 1861, with the help of spectroscopy.
4.
William Crookes was the first to describe the spectrum of terrestrial helium, in 1865.
5.
William Crookes' life was one of unbroken scientific activity that extended over sixty-seven years.
6.
William Crookes was considered remarkable for his industriousness and for his intellectual qualities.
7.
William Crookes's interests, ranging over pure and applied science, economic and practical problems, and psychic research, made him a well-known personality and earned him a substantial income.
8.
William Crookes was born in London in 1832, the eldest of eight surviving children of Joseph Crookes, a wealthy tailor and real estate investor of north-country origin, and his second wife, Mary.
9.
In 1848, at age 16, William Crookes entered the Royal College of Chemistry to study organic chemistry.
10.
William Crookes lived with his parents about three miles from the College in Oxford Street.
11.
In October 1851, William Crookes was promoted to senior assistant, a position he held until 1854.
12.
One of William Crookes' students was the Reverend John Barlow, Secretary of the Royal Institution, who chose to take a course in analytical chemistry.
13.
When William Crookes embarked upon original work, it wasn't in organic chemistry, but rather into new compounds of selenium.
14.
William Crookes worked with Manuel Johnson at the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford in 1854, where he adapted the recent innovation of wax paper photography to machines built by Francis Ronalds to continuously record meteorological parameters.
15.
William Crookes discovered a previously unknown element with a bright green emission line in its spectrum.
16.
William Crookes was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1863.
17.
William Crookes wrote a standard treatise on Select Methods in Chemical Analysis in 1871.
18.
William Crookes published numerous papers on spectroscopy and conducted research on a variety of minor subjects.
19.
William Crookes was, as a consequence, one of the first scientists to investigate what is called a plasma and identified it as the fourth state of matter in 1879.
20.
William Crookes devised one of the first instruments for studying nuclear radioactivity, the spinthariscope.
21.
William Crookes investigated the properties of cathode rays, showing that they travel in straight lines, cause fluorescence when they fall on some substances, and that their impact can produce great heat.
22.
William Crookes believed that he had discovered a fourth state of matter, which he called "radiant matter", but his theoretical views on the nature of "radiant matter" were to be superseded.
23.
William Crookes believed the rays to consist of streams of particles of ordinary molecular magnitude.
24.
William Crookes' attention had been attracted to the vacuum balance in the course of his research into thallium.
25.
William Crookes soon discovered the phenomenon which drives the movement in a Crookes radiometer, in which a set of vanes, each blackened on one side and polished on the other, rotate when exposed to radiant energy.
26.
William Crookes did not provide the true explanation of this apparent "attraction and repulsion resulting from radiation".
27.
William Crookes's household included a large multigenerational family and a number of servants.
28.
William Crookes was able to purchase the house and build the laboratory because of his income from the National Guano Company and from various patents.
29.
William Crookes was helped by his daughter Alice, who was "adept at fractionating rare earth elements" and "no mean interpreter of spectra".
30.
In 1886, William Crookes was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
31.
William Crookes himself suggested a design for a Periodic table in the style of a space lemniscate in 1898.
32.
William Crookes was named president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1898.
33.
William Crookes called on chemists to develop new ways of making fertilizer from the enormous stock of nitrogen in the atmosphere.
34.
In 1903, William Crookes turned his attention to the newly discovered phenomenon of radioactivity, achieving the separation from uranium of its active transformation product, uranium-X.
35.
William Crookes observed the gradual decay of the separated transformation product, and the simultaneous reproduction of a fresh supply in the original uranium.
36.
In 1913, William Crookes created an ultraviolet blocking lens made from glass containing cerium, but only lightly tinted.
37.
William Crookes tested more than 300 formulations, each numbered and labelled.
38.
William Crookes' samples were made by Whitefriars, London, stained glass makers, and Chance Brothers, Birmingham.
39.
William Crookes was possibly influenced by the death of his younger brother Philip in 1867 at 21 from yellow fever contracted while he was on an expedition to lay a telegraph cable from Cuba to Florida.
40.
In 1867, influenced by Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, William Crookes attended a seance to try to get in touch with his brother.
41.
Between 1871 and 1874, William Crookes studied the mediums Kate Fox, Florence Cook, and Daniel Dunglas Home.
42.
Some researchers such as Trevor H Hall suspected that Crookes had an affair with Cook.
43.
In 1916, William Hope tricked Crookes with a fake spirit photograph of his wife.
44.
Oliver Lodge revealed there had been obvious signs of double exposure, the picture of Lady William Crookes had been copied from a wedding anniversary photograph, but William Crookes was a convinced spiritualist and claimed it was genuine evidence for spirit photography.
45.
William Crookes suggested that Crookes had conspired with Anna Eva Fay.
46.
William Crookes noted that contrary to popular belief, Hope had been exposed as a fraud on several occasions.
47.
William Crookes joined the Society for Psychical Research, becoming its president in the 1890s: he joined the Theosophical Society and The Ghost Club, of which he was president from 1907 to 1912.