Sir+William+Crookes

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Name: Sir William Crookes Birth: June 17, 1832 Death: April 4, 1919 Country of Origin: London, England
 * Date of Discovery: 1851**

William Crookes was born in London as the first of sixteen children. He attended the Royal College of Chemistry in hopes of studying organic chemistry where he met Michael Faraday who convinced him to shift his interest towards physics. Through an experiment involving spectroscopy, Crookes discovered a lime green band in the spectrum of selenium, which he later named thallium. While trying to determine the exact atomic weight of thallium using a vacuum, Crookes noticed the arms of the scale moving suddenly, which was eventually credited to the interruption of sunlight and air in the tube. Crookes used this to create the first practical cathode-ray tube in which an electric current was introduced to a vacuum sealed tube containing two electrodes, a cathode, and an anode at each end from which a green glow was emitted. These cathode-ray tubes or “Crookes tubes” eventually lead to the discovery of electrons.