Who is the discoverer of electrons

This ray is called cathode ray and the whole construction is called cathode ray tube. The schematic of a cathode ray tube is given in figure 2. Applying electric field in the path of cathode ray deflects the ray towards positively charged plate. Hence cathode ray consists of negatively charged particles. American physicist Robert Millikan designed an experiment to measure the absolute value of the charge of electron which is discussed below.

In , American physicist R. Millikan measured the charge of an electron using negatively charged oil droplets. However, he still lacked experimental data on what these particles actually were, and hence undertook a third experiment to determine their basic properties. He collected data using a variety of tubes filled with different gases. Just as Emil Wiechert had reported earlier in the year, the mass-to-charge ratio for cathode rays turned out to be over one thousand times smaller than that of a charged hydrogen atom.

Subsequent experiments by Philipp Lenard and others over the next two years confirmed the conclusion that the cathode rays were particles with a mass far smaller than that of any atom.

Thomson boiled down the findings of his experiments into three primary hypotheses: 1 Cathode rays are charged particles, which he called "corpuscles. The term "electron" was coined in by G. Johnstone Stoney to denote the unit of charge found in experiments that passed electrical current through chemicals; it was Irish physicist George Francis Fitzgerald who suggested in that the term be applied to Thomson's corpuscles.

Thomson's speculations met with considerable skepticism from his colleagues. In fact, a distinguished physicist who attended his lecture at the Royal Institution admitted years later that he believed Thomson had been "pulling their legs. The electron itself turned out to be somewhat different from what Thomson imagined, acting like a particle under some conditions and like a wave under others, a phenomenon that would not be explained until the birth of quantum theory.

Physicists also discovered that electrons were only the most common members of an entire family of fundamental particles, which are still the subject of intensive research to better understand their properties. Thomson's work earned him recognition as the "father of the electron," and spawned critical experimental and theoretical research by many other scientists in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and elsewhere, opening a new perspective of the view from inside the atom.

The knowledge gained about the electron and its properties has made many key modern technologies possible, including most of our society's computation, communications, and entertainment. Others thought the rays were streams of particles.

Thomson decided to find out for sure. Thomson was a physics professor at Cambridge University in the UK. He placed cathode tubes in electric and magnetic fields. He knew that these fields will move particles from side to side, but don't have much effect on how a wave moves. In his experiments, the cathode rays bent over to one side, so Thomson knew the cathode rays must be made of some small particle, which he dubbed a "corpuscle. However, people quickly realized that electric current was in fact made of moving electrons.