1 From the 1870’s Crookes’s papers ceased to be entirely experimental and with great effect he used various scientific platforms to offer speculations and to make theoretical pronouncements that, although frequently wide of the mark, were nonetheless plausible and stimulating. To the latter must be attributed the impressive bulk of Crookes’s researches in his later years, including work on scandium and on “Crookes lenses,” published when he was over eighty. With fame, honors, and responsibilities to various scientific societies, he was fortunate to be able to leave the experimental side of his researches to equally adept assistants, notably Charles H. In the latter world he drove many hard bargains but although he was able to make a comfortable living from such commercial ventures as the sodium amalgamation process for gold extraction, the utilization of sewage and animal refuse, and electric lighting, none of them was financially very successful.Ĭrookes was an experimentalist of consummate skill, and the brilliance of his experimentation was the dominant feature in his scientific career his success in producing a vacuum of the order of one millionth of an atmosphere made possible the discovery of X rays and the electron. Unlike Faraday, he was intensely ambitious, both in science and in business. He was knighted in 1897 and received the Order of Merit in 1910.Ĭrookes married Ellen Humphry of Darlington in 1856 and the necessity of supporting ten children helps to explain the amazing diversity and catholicity of his scientific interests, many of which were frankly motivated by the belief that all pure scientific researches would lead to financial rewards. He was nominal editor, and proprietor, of the most successful and important of these journals, Chemical News, from its founding in December 1859 until his death. Finally, in 1856 he settled in London, where, apart from extensive traveling on business, he attempted to bring his name before the scientific community both as a freelance chemical consultant (using a home laboratory) and as an editor of several photographic and scientific journals. In 1854, through Wheatstone’s influence, he became superintendent of the meteorological department of the Radcliffe (Astronomical) Observatory at Oxford and in 1855 he taught chemistry at the College of Science at Chester. Nevertheless, the rigorous training in analytical techniques that he received under Hofmann remained the foundation for all of Crookes’s subsequent researches and his commercial activities. This ignorance, however, was often masked in later years through his friendship with Stokes, who privately solved many mathematical problems in physics for him. There are many indications that Crookes consciously modeled himself on Faraday, with whom he shared a brilliant experimental and lecturing ability, a scrupulous orderliness, and an ignorance of mathematics. Faraday introduced him to Charles Wheatstone and George Stokes, and together the three men were largely responsible for turning Crookes away from traditional chemical problems and toward chemical physics, exemplified then by the optical problems of photography and later by spectroscopy. After gaining the Ashburton Scholarship, he served as Hofmann’s personal assistant from 1850 to 1854 and came to the attention of Faraday at the Royal Institution. Hofmann’s Royal College of Chemistry in London. In 1848, after irregular schooling, he received his scholarly introduction to science when he became a student at A. London, 4 April 1919)Ĭrookes was the eldest son of the sixteen children of Joseph Crookes, a prosperous tailor, by his second wife, Mary Scott.
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