Francis Hauksbee the Elder (1666-1713) was an English experimental physicist and a designer of scientific instruments, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (1705). Until 1704 he carried out experiments in his own workshop, and later at the Royal Society. He studied the propagation of sound in air and in other media, atmospheric refraction, electrical phenomena, electroluminescence and capillarity, and built a number of physical instruments. He constructed the first glass electrical machine (1706) and improved the air pump (1709). One of the earliest investigators of electrical discharges, he discovered in 1710 the glow of air in a glass tube under an electrical discharge. He detected the “electric wind”.