The Atom

The Atom

In the spring of 1897 J.J. Thomson demonstrated that the beam of glowing

matter in a cathode-ray tube was not made of light waves, as "the almost

unanimous opinion of German physicists" held. Rather, cathode rays were

negatively charged particles boiling off the negative cathode and attracted to

the positive anode. These particles could be deflected by an electric field and

bent into curved paths by a magnetic field. They were much lighter than

hydrogen atoms and were identical "what ever the gas through which the discharge

passes" if gas was introduced into the tube. Since they were lighter than the

lightest known kind of matter and identical regardless of the kind of matter

they were born from, it followed that they must be some basic constituent part

of matter, and if they were a part, then there must be a whole. The real,

physical electron implied a real, physical atom: the particulate theory of

matter was therefore justified for the first time convincingly by physical

experiment. They sang success at the annual Cavendish dinner.

Armed with the electron, and knowing from other experiment that what was

left when electrons were stripped away from an atom was much more massive

remainder that was positively charged, Thomson went on in the next decade to

develop a model of the atom that came to be called the "plum pudding" model.

The Thomson atom, "a number of negatively electrified corpuscles enclosed in a

sphere of uniform positive electrification" like raisins in a pudding, was a

hybrid: particulate electrons and diffuse remainder. It served the useful

purpose of demonstrating mathematically that electrons could be arranged in a

stable configurations within an atom and that the mathematically stable

arrangements could account for the similarities and regularities among chemical

elements that the periodic table of the elements displays. It was becoming

clear that the electrons were responsible for chemical affinities between

elements, that chemistry was ultimately electrical.

Thomson just missed discovering X rays in 1884. He was not so unlucky

in legend as the Oxford physicist Frederick Smith, who found that photographic

plates kept near a cathode-ray tube were liable to be fogged and merely told his

assistant to move them to another place. Thomson noticed that glass tubing held

"at a distance of some feet from the discharge-tube" fluoresced just as the wall

of the tube itself did when bombarded with cathode rays, but he was too intent

on studying the rays themselves to purse the cause. Rontgen isolated the effect

by covering his cathode-ray tube with black paper. When a nearby screen of

florescent material still glowed he realized that whatever was causing the