Description
This delicate glass vacuum tube is labelled "E.E. Feb 8". E.E. is Ebenezer Everett, virtuoso glass-blower and personal assistant to Cavendish Professor J.J. Thomson, and he created this in-house at the Cavendish Laboratory.

Ebenezer Everett (1865-1933) was born in Chesterton, just outside Cambridge. In 1886 he was poached by a desperate J.J. Thomson from the Chemistry Laboratory. Thomson was no glassblower himself, and needed an expert assistant for his research. (He once confessed in frustration that he believed all of the glass in the Laboratory was bewitched.)

The partnership between J.J. and E.E. lasted 41 years. He is estimated to have made over 5,000 pieces of apparatus, and taught numerous students. His contribution to science was recognised by an M.A. by the University – (unfortunately, still) a very unusual honour for a technician.

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Glass has been prized for centuries for its transparency and moldability. It’s these qualities that make it one of the most important materials in the history of physics. The Whipple cares for a large collection of glassware from the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory of Experimental Physics.

Most of it dates from the 1880s to the 1930s, when Cavendish Professor J.J. Thomson and his students were studying the mysterious glows and rays that can be seen through the glass when electricity is run through a gas in a partial vacuum. These studies led to Thomson’s discovery that cathode rays were made up of sub-atomic negatively charged particles in 1897. He named them corpuscles: we know them as electrons.

Everett and the other members of the Cavendish Laboratory’s technical team created and repaired the intricate vessels to order: whatever the researcher needed for his or her experiments. Removing the air from a vessel like this one might take Everett half a day using a hand-pump before he was able to fill it with a gas (in this case, helium).

Many of the technicians joined the Laboratory as young boys and remained there throughout their careers. This meant there was an unbroken continuity of craft and technical knowledge across the Laboratory’s first six decades.

“Only those who have tried it know how exasperating glass-blowing can be, and how often when the apparatus is finished it breaks and the work has to be begun again.”
J.J. Thomson, Cavendish Professor, 1936

10/07/2025
Created by: Hannah Price on 10/07/2025