The detection of cathode rays was a by-product of the investigation of the discharge of electricity through rarefied gases. The latter phenomenon had been studied since the early eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was known that the passage of electricity through a partly evacuated tube produced a glow in the gas, whose color depended on its chemical composition and its pressure. Below a certain pressure the glow assumed a stratified pattern of bright and dark bands.
During the second half of the nineteenth century the discharge of electricity through gases became a topic of intense exploratory experimentation, primarily in Germany [21]. In 1855 the German instrument maker Heinrich Geißler (1815– 1879) manufactured improved vacuum tubes, which made possible the isolation and investigation of cathode rays [23]. In 1857 Geissler's tubes were employed by Julius Plücker (1801–1868) to study the influence of a magnet on the electrical discharge. He observed various complex and striking phenomena associated with the discharge. Among those phenomena were a “light which appears about the negative electrode” and a fluorescence in the glass of the tube ([9], pp. 122, 130).
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Arabatzis, T. (2009). Cathode Rays. In: Greenberger, D., Hentschel, K., Weinert, F. (eds) Compendium of Quantum Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70626-7_27
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