Spinthariscope
Espintariscopio
- Date
- 1903 · confidence high
- Place
- London, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- William Crookes
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What it is
An instrument devised by William Crookes to observe, on a zinc-sulfide screen, the individual flashes produced by the disintegration of radioactive atoms.
What it led to
- Precursor of modern scintillation counters
- Public popularisation of radioactivity
- Early-20th-century scientific novelty items using radioactive material
- Visual alpha-particle detection tools