1910–1911
Britannica 11th
Encyclopaedia Britannica · 11th edition
ELECTRON, the name suggested by Dr G. Johnstone Stoney in 1891 for the natural unit of electricity to which he had drawn attention in 1874, and subsequently applied to the ultraatomic particles carrying negative charges of electricity, of which Professor Sir J. J. Thomson proved in 1897 that the cathode rays consisted. The electrons, which Thomson at first called corpuscles, are point charges of negative electricity, their inertia showing them to have a mass equal to about ;o'oo that of the hydrogen atom. They are …
- Source status
- OCR text aligned to scanned pages
- Pages
- Vol. 9, pp. 237-237