Joseph Crooks Research Paper

William Crookes was an English chemistry who was born on June 17, 1834 in London He was the oldest of 16 children of a wealthy tailor and real estate investor. His father Joseph Crookes was a tailor of north-country origin, living with his second wife, Mary Scott Lewis Rutherford Johnson. At age 16 he entered the Royal College of Chemistry. He wanted to study organic chemistry and while there, he became the assistant to August Wilhelm von Hofmann, a position which allowed him to attend meetings at the Royal Institution. At a meeting Crookes met with a physicist named Michael Faraday who convinced him to change studies from chemistry to physics. He worked at the department at the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford in 1854, and in 1855 was appointed lecturer in chemistry at the Chester Diocesan Training College. In 1856 he married Ellen, and he had 3 sons and a daughter.
While experimenting with spectroscopy in his laboratory Crookes discovered a lime green band in the spectrum of selenium, a band that belongs to no known element at that time. After a few years he succeeded in isolating the element, which he named thallium. But at the same time a French scientist named C. A. Lamy discovered the element at the same time and people argue who to give the credit to.
He also invented the Crookes tubes which is an early experimental electrical discharge tube, with partial vacuum. He discovered cathode rays, and streams of electrons using the Crookes tubes. The Crookes tube was developed by the Geissler tube, and it consists of partially evacuated glass container of various shapes, with two metal electrodes, the cathode and the anode. Crookes tubes are now used only for demonstrating cathode rays. Crookes tubes also helped make the later development of X-rays