Warren De la Rue

Warren De la Rue was a British chemist, inventor and astronomer, born January 18, 1815 in Guernsey in the Channel Islands and died April 19, 1889 in London, whose early career included practical work on electric lighting and battery chemistry alongside the astronomical photography for which he later became better known. In 1840 he built an early electric light by sealing a coil of platinum wire inside an evacuated glass tube and passing a current through it, using platinum's high melting point and the vacuum's resistance to degradation to let the filament glow without burning out, though the cost of platinum kept the design from any commercial use. From 1856 to 1862 he collaborated with the chemist Hugo Muller on a series of chemical papers, and from 1868 to 1883 he investigated how electricity discharges through gases using an enormous battery of some 14,600 silver chloride cells that he built for the purpose, work that helped found the experimental study of electrical discharges in low-pressure gas.