ABSTRACT
Crookes was 73 years of age in 1905. Having made his contribution to the study of radioactivity, the best of his scientific work was over. However, he did not cease from research. The rare earth elements and their spectra continued to puzzle him and to occupy his time, as did diamonds and their properties. He confided to Armstrong that he could not ‘be happy without some research going on. I think it is that which keeps me going.’1 Nominally, he remained editor of the Chemical News, though from 1905 he seems to have given over some of the responsibility to his assistant, James Gardiner, and to Miss Heather, the editorial assistant in the press’s city offices. He took up a new interest, aeronautics, and busied himself with the affairs of the government’s explosives committee. In business he remained an active director of the Notting Hill Electric Light enterprise, and he had publishing interests in Routledge.2 His institutional commitments continued unabated – he was elected a Vice-President of the Royal Society in 1907 and its Foreign Secretary a year later, and he was an assiduous attendee of Council meetings and of the physics and chemistry publications committee between 1908 and 1910.3 The secretaryship of the Royal Institution was another hefty commitment that he greatly enjoyed. There were occasionally issues that had to be handled with tact, as when he had to advise his good friend Henry Armstrong that he must rehearse his lecture, improve his articulation and voice projection and lecture within the allotted hour.4 He enjoyed creating the lecture programme, one success being to persuade Alfred Wallace to commemorate the jubilee of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.5
