The science behind this announcement began long before April 1897, and Thomson had been using a variety of instruments to investigate phenomena such as ‘cathode rays’. However, Thomson recognised the importance of this phenomenon as a constituent of matter, and identified a way in which the electron could be manipulated and experimented upon. This discovery led to the ‘plum pudding’ model of the atom which viewed the fundamental building blocks of matter as negatively charged corpuscles scattered throughout a cloud of positive charge. He found that their mass to charge ratio was 1000 times smaller than the hydrogen ion – and called these new particles ‘corpuscles’. It was known that these rays could be deflected by a magnetic field, and Thomson used this property to investigate whether these rays were negatively charged particles. These rays caused fluorescence when they hit the far wall of the tube. He investigated the conduction of electricity through gases – work for which he would win a Nobel Prize in 1906.įor the 1897 experiment, Thomson used an electric discharge tube which produced ‘cathode rays’ at low pressures. In the Cavendish Laboratory, then located on Free School Lane, Thompson conducted experiments as Director of the Laboratory. Thomson announced his discovery of negatively charged constituents of the atom, which we now call electrons. Another one of these spots is located just outside the SPS Library on Free School Lane: the laboratory where the electron was discovered.ġ22 years ago, on the 30th of April 1897, J. Perhaps the pub where Watson and Crick ‘discovered’ DNA or the Mathematical Bridge, supposedly ‘designed by Isaac Newton’. Whenever you walk through central Cambridge, you will encounter tour groups gathering at key spots throughout the city centre.
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