J.J.+Thompson;

Basile; Eastman; Johnson;

Name: Sir John Joseph Thompson (J.J. Thompson) Birth: December 18, 1856 Death: August 30, 1940 Country of Origin: Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England
 * Date of Discovery: 1897**

Joseph John Thomson was born in Manchester, England December 18, 1856. Thomson began at Owens College in Manchester, but later moved on to Trinity College which was one of the most prestigious colleges at the time. There, Thomson finished second in his class and began working as the third Cavendish professor at Cambridge. When working in Cambridge, Thomson discovered the electron in a series of experiments designed to study the nature of electric discharge in a high-vacuum cathode-ray tube. Thomson interpreted the deflection of the rays by electrically charged plates and magnets as evidence of bodies smaller than atoms that he calculated as having a very large value for the charge to mass ratio. Later he suggested that an atom was a sphere of positively charged matter surrounded by electrons. Using “negatively” charged plums in “positively” charged plum pudding, Thomson created the Plum Pudding Model.

This came to be known as the Plum Pudding Model: