Joseph John Thomson Was Born On December 18, 1856 Near Manchester, Eng

Joseph John Thomson was born on December 18, 1856 near Manchester, England. His father died when J.J.. was only sixteen. The young Thomson attended Owens College in Manchester, where his professor of mathematics encouraged him to apply for a scholarship at Trinity College, one of the most prestigious of the colleges at Cambridge University. Thomson won the scholarship, and in 1880 finished second in his class in the grueling graduation examination in mathematics. Trinity gave him a fellowship and he stayed on there, trying to craft mathematical models that would reveal the nature of atoms and electromagnetic forces. One hundred years ago, amidst glowing glass tubes and the hum of electricity, the British physicist J.J.. Thomson went venturing into the interior of the atom. At the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, Thomson was experimenting with currents of electricity inside empty glass tubes. He was investigating a long-standing puzzle known as cathode rays. His experiments prompted him to make a bold proposal: these mysterious rays are streams of particles much smaller than atoms, they are in fact minuscule pieces of atoms. He called these particles corpuscles, and suggested that they might make up all of the matter in atoms. It was startling to imagine a particle residing inside the atom--most people thought that the atom was indivisible, the most fundamental unit of matter. Thomson's speculation was not explicitly supported by his experiments. It took more experimental work by Thomson and others to sort out the confusion. The atom is now known to contain other particles as well. Yet Thomson's bold suggestion that cathode rays were material constituents of atoms turned out to be correct. The rays are made up of electrons: very small, negatively charged particles that are indeed fundamental parts of every atom. Modern ideas and technologies based on the electron, leading to television and the computer and much else, evolved through many difficult steps. Thomson's careful experiments and adventurous hypotheses were followed by crucial experimental and theoretical work by many others in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and elsewhere. These physicists opened for us a new perspective--a view from inside the atom. First, in a variation of an 1895 experiment by Jean Perrin, Thomson built a cathode ray tube ending in a pair of metal cylinders with a slit in them. These cylinders were in turn connected to an electrometer, a device for catching and measuring electrical charge. Perrin had found that cathode rays deposited an electric charge. Thomson wanted to see if, by bending the rays with a magnet, he could separate the charge from the rays. He found that when the rays entered the slit in the cylinders, the electrometer measured a large amount of negative charge. The electrometer did not register much electric charge if the rays were bent so they would not enter the slit. As Thomson saw it, the negative charge and the cathode rays must somehow be stuck together: you cannot separate the charge from the rays. All attempts had failed when physicists tried to bend cathode rays with an electric field. Now Thomson thought of a new approach. A charged particle will normally curve as it moves through an electric field, but not if it is surrounded by a conductor (a sheath of copper, for example). Thomson suspected that the traces of gas remaining in the tube were being turned into an electrical conductor by the cathode rays themselves. To test this idea, he took great pains to extract nearly all of the gas from a tube, and found that now the cathode rays did bend in an electric field after all. Thomson concluded from these two experiments, I can see no escape from the conclusion that [cathode rays] are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter. But, he continued, What are these particles? are they atoms, or molecules, or matter in a still finer state of subdivision? Thomson's third experiment sought to determine the basic properties of the particles. Although he couldn't measure directly the mass or the electric charge of such a particle, he could measure how much the rays were bent by a magnetic field, and how much energy they carried. From this data he could calculate the ratio of the mass of a particle to its electric charge (m/e). He collected data using a variety of tubes and using different gases. Theories about the atom proliferated in the wake of Thomson's 1897 work. If Thomson had found the single building block of all atoms,