an English chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, London, and worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube and the Crookes radiometer, which today is made and sold as a novelty item. From 1850 to 1854 he filled the position of assistant in the college, and soon embarked upon original work. He worked with Manuel Johnson at the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford in 1854, where he adapted the recent innovation of wax paper photography to machines built by Francis Ronalds to continuously record meteorological parameters.
