How Did Thomson Contribute To The Discovery Of The Electron

Until the nineteenth century the model of the atom resembled a ball, it was thought to look like a small sphere. But in 1897, J. J. Thomson changed the view of the atom with his discovery of the electron. Thomson's work suggested that the atom was not an indivisible particle, like John Dalton said it is like a jigsaw puzzle made of smaller pieces.

For years scientists had known that if an electric current was passed through a vacuum tube, a stream of glowing material could be seen, however no one could explain why. Thomson found that the mysterious glowing stream would bend toward a positively charged electric plate. Thomson had the idea, and was later proven correct that the stream was in fact made up of small particles, pieces of atoms

In 1908, Ernest Rutherford, a former student of Thomson's, proved Thomson's raisin bread structure incorrect. Rutherford’s most important discovery was he postulated the nuclear structure of the atom. Ernest said that a atom is made up mostly of gas and it has a nucleus inside of the atom. A big part of science now is atomic structure. An atom is made up of three parts, protons, electrons, and neutrons. Atoms are the basis for everything in the universe. The importance of the atomic theory is so that all scientist use the same basis to find things out. One of the most remarkable features of atomic theory is that to this day after hundreds of years of research not a single person has discovered a single atom. Some of the best microscopes have been able to see groups of atoms, but no actual picture of a single atom yet exists. The atomic theory can be used to explain many of the ideas in chemistry in which ordinary people are interested. Niels Bohr proposed an improvement, he found out that electrons move in a definite orbit around the Nucleus like the planet. These energy levels are located certain distances from the Nucleus. According to today's atomic theory, electrons don’t orbit in neat planet like orbits, but move at high speeds in an electron cloud around the nucleus. Electrons spin around the nucleus billion times in one second, they do not randomly move though, it depends on how much energy the atom