Sir William Crookes

The first indication of the existence of thallium was noted by Sir William Crookes. Sir William was bom on June 17, 1832, and was educated in the grammar school at Chippenham. At the age of sixteen years he entered the Royal College of Chemistry, where A. W. von Hofmann was serving as the first professor yet in spite of the latter s inspiring influence, he never cared for organic chemistry. His first paper entitled On the Selenocyanides was published when he was nineteen years of age. In 1859 he started the publication of Chemical News, and until 1906 he was the sole editor of that important journal (14). 

Copper surface, 137 Co-precipitation, 440 method, 312, 388 Core shell structure, 411, 415 Crookes, Sir William, 39 Cronstedt, Axel Frederik, 5 Crystal field symmetry, 371 Crystallographic relationships, 265 ErCuPbSj, 265 ErCuPbSej, 265 Er5CuPb3Sen, 266 Er2EuS4, 267 Er2PbS4, 267 LaCuPbSs, 265 La2S3, 265... 

Crookes, Sir William (1832-1919) British chemist and physicist, who in 1861 used spectroscopy to discover thallium and in 1875 invent the radiometer. He also developed an improved vacuum tube (Crookes tube) for studying gas discharges. 

Work on plasmas has roots extending back to the Greeks who found that amber mbbed with various materials tended to attract certain objects. The concept of plasma as the fourth state of matter can be traced to Sir William Crookes (2) in 1879. "So distinct are these phenomena from anything which occurs in air or gas at the ordinary tension, that we are led to assume that we are here brought face to face with Matter in a Fourth state or condition, a condition so far removed from the State of gas as a gas is from a Hquid." This description has been shown to be accurate over many years of experimentation and appHcation of plasmas. 

Sir William Crookes (1832-1919). Spectral analysis of the sludge of lead chambers revealed the green spectral line of the new element. 

Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Soddy, and then Sir William Ramsay documented natural transformations of one element into another in 1902 and 1903. The artificial transmutation of one element into another, however, was first accomplished in 1919 by Rutherford, a physicist. Indeed, the field of nuclear physics has contributed the most to our understanding of the subatomic world since the 1920s. But the scientists who most advocated transmutation as a goal of research and a heuristic principle for understanding the nature of matter—the Nobel Prize winners Ramsay and Soddy, and, in a less prominent way, Sir William Crookes—were chemists, not physicists.1... 

By sending legitimate chemists such as Ramsay and Baskerville samples to test, Hunter was following in the footsteps of Emmens, who in 1897 had sent samples and instructions for repeating his process to Sir William Crookes, who was unable to reproduce Emmens s results. In 1898, Emmens launched his Argentaurum Company, which advertised that for each ounce of silver submitted by investors it would return 3/5 of an ounce of gold. Emmens s efforts to start the company failed, though, when his patent application for the process was turned down (Nelson 2000, 58). 

These elements perplex us in our rearches [sic], baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams. They stretch like an unknown sea before us - mocking, mystifying, and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities (Sir William Crookes, February 16, 1887) . 

It was not until 1895 that Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916) first found hehum on Earth when he experimented with uranium and subsequently coUected the gases that were produced when he treated his samples with acid. He sent the gases to Sir William Crookes (1832—1919), who identified one gas as hehum. Two Swedish chemists, Per Theodor Cleve... 

Thallium T1 1861 (London, England) Sir William Crookes (British) 186... 

Nonetheless, the esoteric term seemed attractive and most fitting to the situation at hand. In April 1902, Rutherford wrote to Sir William Crookes, stating, I believe that in the radioactive elements we have a process of disintegration, or transmutation, steadily going on, which is the source of the... 

Crookesite. In 1866 Baron Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiold found among the collections at the Royal Museum in Sweden a rare mineral from Skrikerum, which C. G. Mosander had regarded as a copper selenide. When Baron Nordenskiold analyzed it, he found it to be a selenide of copper, silver, and thallium. Because it was the first mineral of which the recently discovered element thallium was shown to be an essential constituent, he named it crookesite in honor of Sir William Crookes, the discoverer of thallium (31). Although crookesite is very rare, selenium and thallium are often found associated in nature, and both of these elements, so different in chemical properties, were originally discovered in the same source, namely the slime in the lead chambers of sulfuric acid plants using seleniferous and thalliferous pyrite. 

Many elements are present in the earth s crust in such minute amounts that they could never have been discovered by ordinary methods of mineral analysis. In 1859, however, Kirchhoff and Bunsen invented the spectroscope, an optical instrument consisting of a collimator, or metal tube fitted at one end with a lens and closed at the other except for a slit, at the focus of the lens, to admit light from the incandescent substance to be examined, a turntable containing a prism mounted to receive and separate the parallel rays from the lens and a telescope to observe the spectrum produced by the prism. With this instrument they soon discovered two new metals, cesium and rubidium, which they classified with sodium and potassium, which had been previously discovered by Davy, and lithium, which was added to the list of elements by Arfwedson. The spectroscopic discovery of thallium by Sir William Crookes and its prompt confirmation by C.-A. Lamy soon followed. In 1863 F. Reich and H. T. Richter of the Freiberg School of Mines discovered a very rare element in zmc blende, and named it indium because of its brilliant line in the indigo region of the spectrum. 

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