Geissler Tubes - Periodic Table of Videos 

Would love to hear more about your grandfather in future videos. Sounds like he was an amazing guy.

This particular set of Geissler tubes appears to be from the 1870s to 1880s. They could be as late as the 1890s. Usually they included d asmall amount of mercury vapour, and uranium oxide in the glass. The internal tubes are usually quartz glass, the liquids can be any number of liquids from quinine to various alanines. The electrodes were usually made of platinum. The styles shown here are generally found in French manufacture, and may contain rhodamine (for red fluorescence) quinine, for blue, or various combinations thereof. Some were engineered to deliberately show stratification in the plasma with distinctive banding (dependent on internal leakage), others contained powders to recharge or reduce the pressure, and absorb contaminants. There was a run of production int he 30s as well, if I remember correctly, but these appear to potentially be quite a bit older. The most unusual geissler tubes were actually mechanical/physical electrical valves, which would divert the energy to one side of the tube or the other, dependent on the electrical 'flow' direction, using the formation of the glass itself to make the rectifying effect. The ones with red glass in the sealing surfaces (around the electrodes) are probably pre-1900.

your grandfather invented the volume knob? Tesla bless your grandfather

I think gramps would be even more impressed that we viewers are sitting at every and all corners of the Earth. Shoutout from Singapore.

"Martyn's Historic Discharge" PHRASING.

Your father invented the hearing loop? That's awesome! As a deaf person (Been deaf since my birth) with Cochlear Implants I'm very thankfull for all the aid, thanks to that, I can almost hear like a normal person. Loves from Belgium!

What a wonderful heritage. The tubes might contain uranium, used for a green or yellow colour since the late 19th century. Uranium glass is fluorescent under UV. The one on the far right at 1:50 looks a little like "Vaseline glass "which typically contains uranium and is slightly cloudy. Negligibly radioactive.

Every time a video comes out on this channel I get very excited.

This man is such a legend.

show this to people who don't understand science. they're all like "YEAH, SCIENCE! what does it do??" you: "nothing.. it makes pretty colors"

Nice to get a bit of family history combined with such a neat little object. Lovely video.

7 people so far are leaking 100-year-old gas.

Your grandfather must have been an amazing man, and so are you. He could have never imagined you talking and showing this to so many people, and in fact talking about science to this many people. Take pride in what you do, it's well deserved!

Dear Professor I really appreciate you sharing this about your grandfather. Please tell us more about him!

Finally my long search came to an end...this man is 66 years old!

Your grandfather would be proud that you have shown some of his equipment to over 300k people. Great videos! 👍

Thank you, Sir Martyn, for sharing with us something from your family history that is special to you, your grandfather, and your family. I am very grateful to you for keeping these memories alive and also for your work in educating us about chemistry and other sciences.

Thanks for another video. Very sentimental feeling all of a sudden when he mentioned the idea of years those glass tubes being 100 of years old but still able to live on in entertaining ideas. And then mentioning his grandfather was the icing on the sentimental cake. Prof Martyn : best entertainer/professor on the Interwebs.

Wow, I had no idea that Professor Poliakoff had such genius ancestors. I hope he has a lot of grandchildren! Humanity needs those great genes.

Sir Martyn, thank you for sharing the story of someone who means so much to you, and indeed, to so many people around the world. Not only are his Geissler tubes fascinating, but just imagine if he could know how many lives have been touched by his genius. My utmost respect to you. In you, his genius and enthusiasm for the world about you are quite evident!

...a very poignant and heartwarming ending. Not only are the Geissler Tubes being shared with a larger audience than he could have ever imagined through means he would see as magic...they're serving as tinder for a knew generation of inventors and chemists

Favorite video so far! Isn't it memorizing how far technology has brought us, and how quickly!

Thanks so much for sharing this precious part of your family history with us, Sir P!

Isn't it uranium glass ? It looks greeninsh and it glows under UV light with this faint green

A very interesting piece of equipment! It was very generous of the professor to bring these out to demonstrate them, considering they are special to him and must be quite fragile.

Excellent video! You are the best Prof. I watch this channel mainly to hear you and your (awesome) stories!

Some Geissler tubes are not purely decorative, they were used with 'Lecher lines' for measuring standing UHF radio waves, looking for the points where the glow died down as zero points or 'nodes'.

I read about Josef Poliakoff, a grandfather you can be proud of! Awesome! Now I even like our Prof even more!

Excellent video!

Thank you for sharing this wonderful family heirloom. I was certainly fully entertained.

I feel honoured and also lucky to be given the chance to take part in this interesting remembrance.

Professor Poliakoff whips out his 100-year-old discharge rod--and it still works like a charm.

I felt a sudden connection to you right now. I work at a healthcare center here in Norway, and one of the areas I am in duty of, is hearing aid. I requisitioned a hearing loop the other day. In norwegian it is called a "teleslynge". I love Periodic Videos, and the ones featuring you, are the best of them all. Thanks.

Thanks to you Professor and all the team in Periodic Videos :-) Excerpt from NYRB: Tony Judt - Meritocrats "But I only ever became closely acquainted with one such person-my neighbor Martyn Poliakoff, great-grandnephew of the Poliakoff who built the Russian railways, a spiky-haired eccentric out of Westminster School who went on to secure a CBE, Fellowship of the Royal Society, and deserved renown as a popularizer of chemistry to young people. Hardly your typical toff."

Wow, doing some background reading your whole family did amazing things. And i'm proud to say so are you Martyn. Keep it up!

thank you so much for sharing these unique artifacts with us, i love all your video's but its special things like this that make you guys top tier :)

That's so cool. Thanks for showing us that. Wish you guys made videos more often though.

Yes Sir! There are 850,000+ subscribed to this Channel...def a big audience. I wonder if your grandfather knew Tesla (or Edison). It would be excellent to hear more about him in future videos. Thank you.

Reverse engineering the apparatus might prove as many questions and answers as the Faraday candle lecture. I'd love to hear Sir Martyn do an episode on just this. BTW I'm sure his late grandfather is as excited about the youtube audience as he was for his grandson's CBE and other titles.

i could listen to the prof all day. Very informative, and very entertaining.. Which is a very rare combination.

I have been entertained as well as educated Thanks! Always enjoy these videos. I'm working my way slowly through all of them

Hello, Professor! Thank you for sharing your grandfather's antiques with us. At 3:38 the glass glows a distinct greenish yellowish color. It looks very much like the pieces of uranium glass in my collection, which give the same color when activated by UV light.

You are such an amazing person. If we all had teachers like you no one would ever drop out of school

Love these videos. Just relaxing for some reason listening to him explain things.

Look, here's the deal. It's absolutely magnificent that this man teaches so many people so many amazing things, but.... and here's the biggie... I absolutely love him so much because he makes me smile. It's cool when someone makes learning fun. Yes yes, is there a cooler Prof on the planet? I think not. I'm sure you've heard it a million times, but Martyn Poliakoff is the epitome and complete embodiment of the art of awesome teaching.

The videos you make will always be popular to most of us, the quality is perfect on every video from this channel.

Thank's for sharing this with us professor!

Always a treat to see Professor Poliakoff again. Surprized that the infamous and ominous Neil was kept off camera, somehow he seems very appropriate for Halloween season.

They are indeed entertaining :D Great video , i love watching every single one of your uploads.

Martyn Poliakoff is a treasure!

Thank you for sharing these with us.

These are quite magical, never heard of them! Can't imagine what it must've been like for those back in the day to see them.

So cool to see in many peoples eyes such nerdy things. I wouldn't mind seeing the Professors vacuum tube collection either. Maybe?? It would be a winner.. This man grew up around the time Bell labs invented the transistor.. The "glory days" as we are being dumbed down today it seems.. Great video of 160 year old technology which is still amazing.

A couple of the things the professor says in this video surprise me. For one, he seems to think the glass is doped with iron to make it yellow and fluorescent. It is almost certainly "vaseline glass" however, doped with uranium. A simple geiger counter test will affirm this quickly. Also, he is strangely under the impression that the determination of the gasses inside will be difficult and potentially destructive to the tube??? All the information to determine the gas or gasses inside is already there. You're looking at it. One can tell simply by observing the color alone that it must be either air, argon, helium, mercury vapor, or possibly but HIGHLY unlikely, krypton or xenon. The simplest spectral analysis even done with a handheld piece of cheap diffraction grating will immediately reveal which of these gasses it is. The lines of mercury are instantly recognizable, as are the quasi-continuous repeating bands of the many rovibrational transitions of nitrogen and oxygen molecules if it's air. All of this could be done in seconds with equipment that I'm sure his lab has around somewhere.

Wonderful legacy to have an audience for your work 100 years later.

These are fantastic! Love your videos!

The true magnificence of these contraptions is that whenever these experiments are performed, they show how beautiful orbitals can be when excited :)

Thank you for sharing with us.

Thank you for this! Simply delightful and very entertaining.

Thank you so much Professor! I love your videos and anecdotes!

AWESOME! I've been dying for a new episode!

this is very entertaining. thanks for the three of you who did this video👍

thanks for sharing Martin! really cool!

This guy is absolutely delightful.

I love your videos!! Thank you so much for sharing!!!

those look so cool! i love the colors they make!

Professor, your grandfather has so far entertained over a hundred thousand people. He can definitely rest in peace. This is more than he would have expected :)

The reason they work with only one electrode 'connected' is that the tubes have a capacitance. As the supply is AC current flows in and out of the tubes and therefore they are supplied with energy which they convert into light.

what an awesome heritage for an awesome man

We are gratefull to your grandfather and you for this video!

Those are some interesting items. Cool that they still work.

Absolutely phenomenal.

Great video. Thanks for sharing this.

It definitely entertained me. Thank you.

Wow that was an amazing video. I love this channel

That was really cool, and it is kind of inspiring to think about how small the audience would have been back when your grandfather was still alive, compared to the audience it is receiving AS WE SPEAK!

My grandfather invented too, more of improved upon the CRT tube to make it much slimmer and operate at lower voltage. He also helped a guy known as Oppenheimer on something.

I find it quite amazing how Sir Martyn here is showing this stuff to us on RU-vid, and he knew and is related to a person born 140 years ago :D

Fascinating! I once had a book named the boy electrician and was fascinated by it. By today's standards almost all of the experiments described were truly lethal. It detailed how to make a spark coil which provide arcs of over three inches. This would be about 30kV. It also described experiments with X-Rays. It also mentioned Giessler Tubes so was quite interested to see one. From memory argon was blue, helium was yellow...can't remember any more.

The fact those things are upwards of 100 years old and still working is astounding. Considering a barely used light bulb in my house might last a year and that serves a functional purpose, not just pretty for the sake of pretty.

Thank you again, Sir Martyn.

Well sir , very impressive . I'm looking forward for more videos 😊 . May your ancestors be remembered for doing this .

Very entertaining indeed, thank you Periodic Tables.

great video. Thanks for posting !!

The greenish glass is "uranium glass", or vaseline glass (same thing). It's still used today in Geissler tubes, as it gives off a lovely glow when it's subjected to high tension electricity. The gas in the tubes is probably only residual air molecules, given the pink discharge in the bulbs. This is the most common thing for ordinary Geissler tubes, they are just evacuated to a fairly strong vacuum, and further colour is introduced to the discharge by adding vaseline glass and/or various liquids. The liquids are more difficult to identify right off the bat.

great video! missed you guys😀

Professor, thank you for sharing your grandfather items.

Great video! thanks for sharing!

Did anyone else notice that the box he took those out of were labeled "Martin's historic discharge"? Best part of the whole video.

Absolutely something completely valuable! Thank you very much!

I love how he casually talks about his grandfather like "oh yeah, he invented volume control and the transistor". It just makes him more awesome.

They are certainly entertaining! Thank you for sharing. One geissler tube had a purple-pink colouring to the discharge very reminiscent of the novelty "plasma globes". perhaps that's a place to start your search?

This is nostalgic to me because when I was young (nearing teens, almost 40 years ago) I went to the library often and was fascinated by books that taught science. There was one book that had various sort of DIY stuff about making high voltage experiments, including high voltage transformers and Tesla coils AND these tubes. It was fascinating but sadly my only attempt was not very successful. I attempted to make a high voltage high frequency transformer from a used car ignition transformer by stripping the cap from it so that I could access the magnetic core (laminated steel plates) to make a magnetic resonance switch to operate it in relatively high frequencies. I think I got close, but not enough, it never produced any satisfying sparks even :) And I don't think I would have had any clue as to where to get these wondrous glowing glass tubes either.

it looked so magical

Thank you for the presentation! It is an honor to hear your insights into the scientific world.

Ah, that Poliakoff. Wow, i'm sound engineer and have installed hearing aid induction loops and of course; volume control is #1 tool so just.. wow... Absolutely wonderful, i feel so warm now, almost charged..

That was really interesting, thanks for showing us! :)

Great video! Thanks for posting :)

I love how enthusiastic he is about chemistry

How nice of the Professor to dig these out for us all :D