Crookes tube
A Crookes tube is an early experimental electrical discharge tube, with vacuum, invented by English physicist William Crookes and others around 1869-1875, in which cathode rays, streams of electrons, were discovered.
Developed from the earlier Geissler tube, the Crookes tube consists of a partially evacuated glass bulb of various shapes, with two metal electrodes, the cathode and the anode, one at either end. When a high voltage is applied between the electrodes, cathode rays (electrons) are projected in straight lines from the cathode. It was used by Crookes, Johann Hittorf, Julius Plücker, Eugen Goldstein, Heinrich Hertz, Philipp Lenard and others to discover the properties of cathode rays, culminating in J.J. Thomson's 1897 identification of cathode rays as negatively charged particles, which were later named electrons. Crookes tubes are now used only for demonstrating cathode rays.
Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays using the Crookes tube in 1895. The term Crookes tube is also used for the first generation, cold cathode X-ray tubes, which evolved from the experimental Crookes tubes and were used until about 1920.
Crookes tubes are cold cathode tubes, meaning that they do not have a heated filament in them that releases electrons as the later electronic vacuum tubes usually do. Instead, electrons are generated by the ionization of the residual air by a high DC voltage (from a few kilovolts to about 100 kilovolts) applied between the electrodes, usually by an induction coil (a "Ruhmkorff coil"). The Crookes tubes require a small amount of air in them to function, from about 10−6 to 5×10−8atmosphere (7×10−4 - 4×10−5torr or 0.1-0.005 pascal).
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