High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Thomas Thorp (1850–1914) was an English manufacturer of scientific instruments credited with inventing the first practical coin-in-the-slot gas meter, with innovations in the field of photography, including that involving colour, and for producing an early example of what has since been developed into the modern spectrohelioscope. He began his working life as an apprentice to a firm of architects and ended it as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, having had a keen interest in astronomy since childhood.