At the same time, Michael Faraday coined the terms “ion”, “cation” and “anion” to designate the types of chemicals with electric charge that in a battery travelled from one electrode to another through a liquid medium: the cations towards the cathode and the anions towards the anode. The atom was not indivisibleīy the mid-nineteenth century, Richard Laming was already suggesting that the atom was not really indivisible, but was composed of a core of matter surrounded by units of electric charge. But we should at least return to the idea of an electric fluid, originating in the eighteenth century and whose excess or defect Benjamin Franklin related to the ideas of positive or negative charge. To reconstruct the story, perhaps it is not necessary to go back so far as ancient Greece, where the word “ elektron” referred to amber, capable of attracting small objects when rubbed. The history of the electron and its alleged discoverer are actually two separate lines that ended up meeting. The truth is that the discovery of the electron could be considered an early case of collective science, advancing from diverse approaches and at the hands of different researchers who, according to Navarro, “had different problems in mind.” And G.P Thomson (Cambridge University Press, 2012), suggests to OpenMind. “The word ‘discover’ is problematic,” Jaume Navarro, author of the book A History of the Electron. But was it really so? The discovery of the electron is attributed to the English physicist Joseph John Thomson. But within a short time that discovery revolutionized the scientific understanding of matter, opening the way to particle physics and also to a multitude of applications in the field of electronics-according to the textbooks. He was a well-known scientist in his day, but his announcement was hard to believe as it was thought at the time that there was nothing smaller than an atom. Every April 30 we celebrate the anniversary of the discovery of the first subatomic particle: the electron, an achievement that the encyclopaedias attribute to the English physicist Joseph John Thomson in 1897.
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