Description
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.

The Cavendish Laboratory’s technical team included gifted glassblowers. They created and repaired the intricate vessels to order: whatever the researcher needed for his or her experiments.

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.

Scientific glassblowers work with prefabricated tubes of set diameters and thicknesses. They use a flame and their own breath to expand and bend them into the shapes needed for
each experiment.

George Crowe has skillfully manipulated a standard tube to create this coil, before pumping it and filling it with xenon.

A colleague recalled in the 1960s that “He could do most things that required to be done, whether it was with metal or glass or photography. With such old-fashioned things as mica or wax, he was an artist. It would still be an exercise for an apprentice to make the tubes. When one adds the difficulty and the hazards of the radioactive filling it was a task for a craftsman. [This] played not a negligible part in an intellectual revolution.”
10/07/2025
Created by: Hannah Price on 10/07/2025

Description
This discharge tube was originally made and used in the Cavendish Laboratory of Experimental Physics in the 1920s by George Crowe. The physicists' work would not have been possible without the expertise and patience of the Laboratory's technical staff. They created, set up, and maintained the sometimes perilously fragile apparatus.

This glass tube carries a handwritten label:
"‘Xenon
Made Aug 1925
GACrowe"

George Crowe, the son of a Cambridge boat-builder, joined the Cavendish as a boy in 1907. He retired as Principal Assistant in 1959. Crowe learned glass-blowing from C.T.R. Wilson, and helped Wilson build his 1911 Cloud Chamber. In 1919, he became Ernest Rutherford's personal assistant. Calm, highly-skilled, and ready to try anything, he was the perfect foil to the creative and tempestuous Rutherford.

Rutherford's research on radioactivity relied on delicate glass vessels such as these. They were handmade by Crowe, emptied with a vacuum pump, and usually filled with the unstable gases given off by radioactive substances. Crowe needed skin grafts as a result of dealing with X-rays and radium, and lost the tip of one of his fingers.

26/02/2025
Created by: Hannah Price on 26/02/2025