William Crookes
British chemist and physicist (1832-1919) · Scientists · Died at 86
William Crookes is read about 140 times a day, in 58 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 16 September 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 361 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?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.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
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In their own words 10
, The task I am called upon to perform today is to my thinking by no means a merely formal or easy matter.
I am not disposed to bewail the limitations imposed by human ignorance.
It can scarcely be denied that the fundamental phenomena which first led mankind into chemical inquiries are those of combustion.
Awards
About this person
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.
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