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2026-10-06 IET Archives blog (Institution of Engineering and Technology)

URL: https://ietarchivesblog.org/2017/05/10/charles-and-edward-gimingham-light-bulb-pioneers/ Query (Google): Gimingham Crookes assistant Sprengel pump radiometer.

Found [web]

  • Blog post "Charles and Edward Gimingham - Light Bulb Pioneers", 10 May 2017, on a donation of papers of Charles Henry Gimingham (1853-1890) and Edward Alfred Gimingham (1868-1953), catalogued as IET archive SC MSS 285 (consult by appointment, IET Archive Centre, Savoy Hill House, London).
  • Extract from C. H. Gimingham's obituary in The Electrician, October 1890 (as quoted on the blog): born 1853, City of London School; "At the age of 16 he became private assistant to Mr William Crookes FRS with whom he remained 12 years, assisting him in his researches on the radiometer and radiant matter"; in 1876 he invented "his now widely used multiple tube Sprengel air pump, reading a short paper on the subject before the Royal Society"; joined the Swan Company in July 1881, set up the Benwell (Newcastle) lamp factory with his 5-tube Sprengel pump; later Edison and Swan factories at Newcastle and Ponders End.
  • The collection holds Charles's ledger of earnings and work from 1878 to July 1881, i.e. covering the period of the Sheffield lecture (clients listed on the blog are outside work: Wedgwood, Darwin, Balfour, Abney).
  • Edward Gimingham later made the first vacuum flasks for Dewar and the first oscillator valves for Fleming (from a 1942 AEI News article quoted on the blog).

Bearing on the claims

  • The lecture names "Mr. Gimingham" (first name not given) as builder of the hinged-cross bulb, the glass-railway paddle wheel and the magnetic paddle wheel [read: deep read p.12-17]. This source identifies him as Charles Henry Gimingham (1853-1890), Crookes's private assistant c.1869-1881, inventor of the multiple-tube Sprengel pump (1876). That pump is the likely source of Crookes's high vacua (claims 1, 6: one millionth and 1/20,000,000 atm); the lecture itself names no pump [read].
  • Record lead: SC MSS 285 (IET) may hold Gimingham's own notes on the apparatus. The 1876 Royal Society paper on the pump is a separate item to find (Proc. R. Soc. 1876).
  • Discrepancy to note: the taminglightning.net PDF says assistant "from 1870 to 1882"; the obituary extract implies about 1869 to July 1881.