How Did The Electron Predated Thomson

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Many people think Thomson discovered the electron but actually, what he discovered was that cathode rays were streams of negatively charged particles with a mass about 1,000 times smaller than a hydrogen atom. He claimed that these particles, which he called “corpuscles,” were the things that atoms were made from. The term “electron” predated Thomson's discovery—a few years earlier Irish physicist G. J. Stoney had proposed that electricity was made of negative particles called “electrons,” and scientists had adopted the word to refer to anything with an electric charge. However, Thomson, who was a physicist at Cambridge University, was the first to suggest that these particles were a building block of the atom.
Thomson proposed (1904) a model

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