It was the Saxony German Johann Heinrich Geissler (1814-1879), a mechanic at the University of Bonn, who invented the tube bearing his name. He, a member of a family of glassmakers, had learnt the art of glass blowing as a youth and exploited his skill on becoming a maker of chemical and physical instruments. To overcome the difficulty of obtaining a good vacuum with the suction pumps then in use, in 1855 he built a glass and mercury vacuum pump with which, by opening and closing a cock and lowering a column of mercury, he succeeded in creating a vacuum very close to 1/10 of a millimetre of mercury in small recipients.
This pump and his skill in glassmaking made it possible for him to produce his tubes in 1857. They were used not only by Julius Plucker (1801-1868), a professor at Bonn, in his important research on discharges in gases, but also gave a strong impulse to all research in that field, and this led to the discovery of cathodic rays.