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High voltage indicators
- Simple straight Geissler tubes were used in early-20th-century scientific research as high voltage indicators. When a Geissler tube was brought near a source of high voltage, alternating current, such as a Tesla coil or Ruhmkorff coil, it would light up even without contact with the circuit.
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Geissler tubes were mass-produced from the 1880s as novelty and entertainment devices, with various spherical chambers and decorative serpentine paths formed into the glass tube. Some tubes were very elaborate and complex in shape and would contain chambers within an outer casing.
The Geissler Tube was invented by the German glassblower and physicist, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Geissler (1814-1879) in 1857. Geissler tubes were the first gas discharge tubes. Each contains rarefied gasses such as neon or argon; conductive fluids; or ionizable minerals or metals.
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- Geissler Tubes
- How A Geissler Tube Works
- The Difference Between Plucker and Geissler
- Hittorf’s Discovery
- William Crookes
- Crookes’ Tube
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Geissler tubes started pretty simply, they were skinny glass tubes with metal electrodes (platinum wires) at either end. The tubes were mostly evacuated (had air removed with a pump) and were filled with trace amounts of certain gasses or vapors. Geissler had just invented a mercury pump and his friend Rumhkorff was selling a device called an induc...
But how did it work? Well, when a high voltage is placed across the tube, some electrons are ripped free of their atoms (leaving positive ions, or atoms missing an electron) and the electrons go zipping towards the positive terminal. On the way, they recombine with the ions creating visible light. The color produced depends on the energy levels of ...
What made Plücker and Geissler’s experiment different is that they were not trying to create a spark in a vacuum or through gasses; they were trying (and succeeding) in using the voltage to electrify the gasses directly. Although Plücker was pleased with the beautiful lights that they were making he was mostly interested in how the light interacted...
Hittorf then immediately used this adjusted pump on a Geissler tube and found a strange result. It seemed like there was light coming from the negative electrode and if he made the electrode into a sharp point, this light would hit the far glass and make it glow, either green or blue depending on the type of glass. He proved that the light was comi...
Now we go to an English scientist named William Crookes. In later life, Crookes’s most distinguishable feature was his completely amazingly over the top mustache! Here is a caricature of him and here is a photo! Anyway, Crookes came from a truly enormous middle class family (his father had five children with his first wife and, ready for it, 16 chi...
In 1869, a talented 16 yr. old named Charles Gimingham became Crookes assistant and by 1876 created a vastly superior vacuum pump for his boss. Crookes then used this new pump on the Geissler tube and found very similar results to Hittorf, although at the higher vacuums the tube itself seemed black and only the glass at the end would glow. In addit...
Plücker “Ueber die Einwirkung des Magneten…” Annalen der Physik und Chemie vol. 103 (1858)p. 88 d’Albe, Fournier The Life of Sir William Crookesp. 16
- Kathy Joseph
Known as Geissler tubes, these are the forerunners of modern neon and fluorescent tubes. Each partially evacuated tube has an electrode at each end. When a high voltage is applied across these electrodes, the tube emits light of a color that depends on the type of gas in the tube.
An early form of gas-discharge tube designed to demonstrate the luminous effects of an electric discharge passing through a low-pressure gas between two electrodes. Modified forms are used in spectroscopy as a source of light. It was invented in 1858 by Heinrich Geissler (1814–79).
These Geissler tubes, as they came to be known, were mass-produced beginning in the 1880s (after Geissler’s death) as novelty items. There are many of them in the collection here at Whatcom County’s SPARK Museum, and they’re beautiful to see. But they are much more than just pretty things.
A Geissler tube is a precursor to modern gas discharge tube s, demonstrating the principles of electrical glow discharge, akin to contemporary neon lights, and central to the discovery of the electron. This device was developed in 1857 by Heinrich Geissler, a German physicist and glassblower.
