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.[2] Three years later, Parker was artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and created two installations using this technology, entitled Quiet Lightning and AM Lightning.[2][3][4][5]
Parker has also exhibited at the MIT Museum,[6][7][8][9] the New York Hall of Science,[10] and the Housatonic Museum at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut.[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.[17] and in 2006 he spun off another company, Creative MicroSystems, focusing on microfluidics.[16] He maintains a studio in Waitsfield, Vermont, and in 2008 he was elected to the Waitsfield select board.[18][19]
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