William Crookes
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The chemist whose partially evacuated tube let cathode rays be seen and studied, and which every later display and vacuum device descends from.
Pumping most of the air out of a glass tube and passing a current through it produced something nobody could account for, and the instruments built to study it produced the electron, the X-ray and the cathode ray tube. The apparatus outlived every theory offered to explain it. That is the ordinary sequence in this field and it is worth stating: a tool built to investigate a puzzle usually turns out to be more durable than the answer it was built to find.
Also known as: crookes, crookes tube, cathode ray