# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/william-crookes
# Generated: 2026-09-07T18:45:37.161Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/william-crookes"
name: "William Crookes"
slug: "william-crookes"
description: "He discovered an element, built tubes that revealed cathode rays, and called what he saw inside them a fourth state of matter — decades before anyone else had the language for plasma."
tagline: "British chemist and physicist (1832-1919)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Sir_William_Crookes_1906.jpg"
gender: "male"
category:
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profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1832-06-17"
deathDate: "1919-04-04"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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  popularity:           56.35
  momentum:             0.3453389830508474
  historical:           24.175788
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  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  60
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  - name: "Physics"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  William Crookes attended the Royal College of Chemistry and turned spectroscopy into a discovery engine: in 1861 he announced thallium, in 1865 he described the spectrum of terrestrial helium for the first time. He invented the Crookes tube in 1875 and, watching cathode rays flicker inside, proposed that "radiant matter" was a unique fourth state — a foundational step toward plasma physics, though he never quite named it that. He also built the Crookes radiometer without fully understanding the phenomenon it displayed. Late in his career, Royal Society investigations into cataracts among furnace workers led him to develop ultraviolet eye protection with opticians on Wigmore Street; by 1918 the resulting Crookes Lenses were in industrial, military, and aviation use across the twentieth century, a quiet ancestor of the modern sunglasses industry.