John Peter Gassiot

John Peter Gassiot FRS (2 April 1797 – 15 August 1877) [also Gassiott] was an English businessman and amateur scientist.

He created an amply-provided laboratory at his home on Clapham Common and opened it to his fellow scientists, including James Clerk Maxwell who performed much of his 1860s work on electrical resistance there.

[1] Gassiot was a close associate of William Sturgeon and Charles Vincent Walker and the three were instrumental in founding the London Electrical Society in 1837.

Starting in 1840 he performed a number of experiments culminating in 1844 where he used a battery of 100 mutually insulated Grove cells to show that a spark could be drawn before an electrical contact was made.

[1] In 1858, Gassiot, in his Bakerian lecture, reported deflections of electrical discharges in rarefied gases both by magnetism and electrostatics.