William P. Parker is an American artist, scientist, and entrepreneur, best known for inventing the modern design of the plasma globe.
[1] The invention occurred in 1971, when Parker was working as a student in a physics laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and accidentally filled a test chamber to a greater-than-usual pressure with ionized neon and argon.
[11] He was the youngest Fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
[12] Plasma globes based on his designs were commercially popular in the 1980s[13][14] and “are found in nearly every science museum in the world".
[15] In the 1980s, Parker founded Diffraction Ltd,[15][16] a defense electro-optics developer that was purchased by the O'Gara Group in 2005.