J j thomson cathode ray experiment
Herz had proved the existence of radio waves in 1887 and Marconi formed a company for wireless transmission, initially using a coherer for detecting radio waves and later a magnetic receiver. Apart from academic posts he became scientific adviser to the Edison Telephone company and to the Edison Electric Light Company whose London power station Wireless He thus had a strong theoretical background but, unlike Thomson, was a natural experimentalist too-see Fig. John Ambrose Fleming (1849–1945) trained as a chemist, transferred to physics under the influence of Professor Frederick Guthrie in London and, after spells of school teaching, studied at the Cavendish laboratory under Maxwell. Engineers are practical people and lack of theory never hindered the search for profitable innovation it was enough that Fleming and the diode valve By 1900 electricity was an integral part of modern economies and yet this had been achieved without any profound grasp of what electricity actually was. The electrical engineering industry started with telegraphy in the 1840s and developed through power generation/distribution and lighting to become one of the major success stories of the second industrial revolution. He continued at the Cavendish which produced a succession of distinguished researchers under his leadership, seven of Electrical engineering and the Edison effect his corpuscle) from the positive electron which (in his view) remained theoretical around 1900. The term “electron” was first coined by George Johnstone Stoney (1826–1911) around 1891 and was widely used but Thomson continued to use the term “corpuscle” in his Nobel lecture of 11 December 1906, possibly because he wished to distinguish the real ponderable negative electron (i.e. Being convinced that Crookes’ experiments would give evidence of the structure of matter and the nature of electricity, he decided to pursue the matter himself with his colleague The electron and atomic physics
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Once safely installed in a permanent job he was largely free to pursue his own interests (academics being less constrained in that era) and he spent the rest of his life investigating electric discharge through gases, a subject his original mentor, Arthur Schuster, described as fit only for “cranks and visionaries”. He won the prestigious Adams Prize in 1882 for work on actions of two closed vortices in a perfectly incompressible fluid, another highly mathematical area, and even did some practical work in the Thomson’s research 1-originally trained in Manchester as an engineer but subsequently came second in the rigorous Cambridge mathematics Tripos in 1880 and stayed there investigating energy transformation using modified Lagrangian theory, a highly theoretical subject, later teaching mathematics. By the mid 19th century there were not only reliable electric power sources but Heinrich Geissler’s Thomson’s background Petersburg, died as a result of his attempt to draw atmospheric electricity down to earth using a wet kite string.
Benjamin Franklin’s famous “sentry box” experiment to harness lightning discharges which he wisely did not attempt. Interest in the often spectacular electrical discharges in gases goes back to at least the 18th century, e.g.
In the late 19th century it was still the received scientific wisdom that atoms were indivisible particles interacting with each other according to the laws of Newtonian mechanics though there were a few niggling Cathode rays This was rejected by Aristotle and nearly everyone else for over 2000 years till Dalton produced his atomic theory in 1803. The idea that matter can be subdivided till it is reduced to small indivisible particles called atoms goes back to the Greek philosopher Democritus around 400BC. Around this time was the birth of the Atomic theory The most famous result of these investigations is that he is considered to have “discovered” the electron which had profound implications in the field of theoretical physics and eventually nuclear technology. In 1906 the British physicist Joseph John Thomson (1856–1940) was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for Physics “in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases”.