Hauksbee was indebted to Newton for some of his theoretical ideas, while the results of his experiments on electroluminescence, static electricity and capillarity in turn influenced Newton's revisions to the Principia and Opticks, as well as the researches of Laplace almost a century later. The improved air-pump which Hauksbee described and illustrated was based on his discovery of the lateral communication of motion in air. His showing of the optical effects of the passage of electricity through air was, in Duveen's view, "the starting point of modern researches, X-rays and the constitution of the atom."