A History of the Electron

Two landmarks in the history of physics are the discovery of the particulate
nature of cathode rays (the electron) by J. J. Thomson in 1897, and the
experimental demonstration by his son G. P. Thomson in 1927 that the
electron exhibits the properties of a wave. Together, the Thomsons are two of
the most significant figures in modern physics, both winning Nobel prizes for
their work. This book presents the intellectual biographies of the father-and-
son physicists, shedding new light on their combined understanding of the
nature of electrons and, by extension, of the continuous nature of matter. It is
the first text to explore J. J. Thomson’s early and later work, as well as the role
he played in G. P. Thomson’s education as a physicist, and how he reacted to
his son’s discovery of electron diffraction. This fresh perspective will interest
academic and graduate students working in the history of early twentieth-
century physics.

J AU M E NAVA R R O is Ikerbasque Research Professor at Universidad del País

Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. He trained in physics, philosophy and
the history of science, and has an international research record, having spent
several years at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the University of Exeter.
 A History of the
Electron
J. J. and G. P. Thomson

J AUME N AVARRO
Ikerbasque Research Professor,
Universidad del País Vasco/
Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Navarro, Jaume.
A history of the electron : J. J. and G. P. Thomson / Jaume Navarro.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-00522-8
1. Electrons–History. 2. Cathode rays. 3. Thomson, J. J. (Joseph John),
1856–1940. 4. Thomson, G. P. (George Paget), 1892–1975. I. Title.
QC793.5.E62N38 2012
539.7′211–dc23 2012018834

ISBN 978-1-107-00522-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To my parents, Rupert and Maria Teresa
 Contents

Introduction 1

1 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge 6

1.1 Manchester 6
1.2 Science in Manchester 8
1.3 Thomson’s early days 12
1.4 Owens College 14
1.5 The Unseen Universe 18
1.6 Undergraduate in Cambridge 21
1.7 Second wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos 23

2 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge:

a continuous and all-embracing physics 29
2.1 In Cambridge as a graduate 29
2.2 Early experimental work at the Cavendish 31
2.3 The origins of the electromagnetic theory of matter 33
2.4 The vortex ring theory of the atom 36
2.5 Director of the Cavendish Laboratory 41
2.6 Third edition of Maxwell’s Treatise 44
2.7 Mapping the domains of the physical sciences 46
2.8 A new tripos for engineering 51

3 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves

to particles 55
3.1 Electric discharge in tubes 55
3.2 From discharge tubes to Faraday tubes 60
3.3 Tubes, electricity, and matter 67
3.4 Opening the Cavendish to new researchers 70

vii
viii Contents

3.5 The corpuscle: notes from a ‘discovery’ 73

3.6 Corpuscles and electrons 81

4 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory

of matter 86
4.1 What is an atom like? 86
4.2 A world of electrons 91
4.3 Psychic research 96
4.4 The collapse of a dream 99
4.5 The carriers of positive electricity 103
4.6 Cambridge as a playground: George Paget Thomson 109

5 Father and son. Old and new physics 114

5.1 The nature of light 114
5.2 The early theory of the quantum 119
5.3 Britain and the quanta in 1913 124
5.4 A father–son collaboration 126
5.5 Physics at war 132
5.6 The electron in chemistry 137

6 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave 143

6.1 Professorship in Aberdeen 143
6.2 Electron diffraction 150
6.3 The father’s interpretation 156
6.4 The son’s reaction 160
6.5 Moving to London. Electron diffraction turns into an instrument 164
6.6 End of an epoch 166

References 171
Index 183
 Introduction

In 1897, Joseph John Thomson, Professor of Experimental Physics

and director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, ascribed corpuscular
nature to the carriers of electricity in cathode rays. This event constitutes a
central element in what is traditionally known as the discovery of the electron.
Exactly 30 years later, his son, George Paget Thomson, obtained the first ever
images of electron diffraction, with which he showed the wave-like behaviour
of his father’s electrons. Ironically, while the father had shown that a wave
phenomenon (cathode rays) could be explained in terms of corpuscular entities
(electrons), the son was reclaiming wave characteristics for his father’s corpus-
cles. This is, in a nutshell, the story of this book, one that, however familiar to
many physicists and historians of science, has never been told in detail.
Alongside this father-and-son narrative, I intend to explore a number of
historiographical and philosophical questions. To begin with, this book is bio-
graphical, but not a traditional biography. The main characters on the stage
are J. J. Thomson, G. P. Thomson and the corpuscle-electron, and the book deals
with the intersection of their lives. There are a number of partial biographies
of J. J. Thomson, starting with his own memoirs (Thomson, 1936; Rayleigh,
1942; G. P. Thomson, 1964; Davis and Falconer, 1997; Kim, 2002), but nobody
has so far written a complete biography of him. Just from counting the pages
in this volume, it is clear that this book is no attempt to plug this bibliograph-
ical lacuna. But it does enter into an aspect of his career often overlooked: his
science in the 1920s, when a young generation of physicists regarded him as a
relic of times past. As I shall argue in Chapters 5 and 6, an examination of his
work in those years sheds some new light on the content and motivation of
the better-known aspects of his career. Nor does a biography of G. P. Thomson
exist. Indeed, there has been surprisingly little historical work done on him for

1
2 Introduction

a man who was inter alia a Nobel laureate in physics, chairman of the MAUD
committee, and Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
As for the electron, a number of biographies of this entity do exist, from
Charles Gibson’s (1911) Autobiography of an Electron to Theodore Arabatzis’ (2006)
Representing Electrons, the latter being a very good case study for a biography of
an epistemic object (Daston, 2000). The present book treats the life of the elec-
tron only insofar as it impinges on the Thomson household, from its concep-
tion as a corpuscle for explaining cathode rays and the conduction of electricity
in gases to its maturity as the first quantum particle with wave properties. We
shall see that, as an epistemic object, this electron underwent a number of
upheavals and personality changes (continuing with the metaphor) in order to
play an explanatory role in an increasing number of phenomena: from cath-
ode rays and atomic constitution to electronic radiation, chemical bonding and
quantum indeterminacy. We shall see how this flexibility was possible partly on
account of its ontological under-determination. In other words, J. J Thomson’s
electron did not exist as an ultimate explanation of what matter is, but rather
as an epistemic object mediating between observed phenomena and the ultim-
ate reality of a continuous ether and the Faraday tubes therein.
As a matter of fact, one could read this book as a biography of Faraday tubes
rather than the electron. To be sure, the ether itself is the underlying entity
in this story, since it was the ether that embodied J. J. Thomson’s belief in
a metaphysics of the continuum. Faraday tubes began as a concrete mental
model within this continuous framework and slowly almost acquired physical
reality in his theoretical work. As we shall see, Thomson expected them to
be the underlying entity that might explain the nature of electrons and the
seemingly contradictory properties of different forms of radiation. Soon after
J. J. Thomson had found evidence for the atomicity of electric charge, physics
began to move towards a more fundamental atomicity, that of energy. With the
new quantum theory, the fundamental tenets of Thomson’s world-view began
to tremble, the existence of the ether was in jeopardy, and the laws of classical
physics proved to be insufficient for explaining certain phenomena. The prob-
lem of accounting for the apparently self-contradictory behaviour of radiation,
at times like corpuscles, at other times like waves, loomed large in Thomson’s
work, which famously led him to coin the expression that physicists were wit-
nessing a struggle between a tiger and a shark. Faraday tubes were, for him, the
tool that might educe harmony between continuity and discontinuity in the
physical world.
Furthermore, G. P. Thomson’s experimental demonstration of the wave-like
behaviour of electrons confirmed J. J.’s lifelong-held metaphysical views that
gave priority to a continuous medium (the ether) rather than to the corpuscular
 Introduction 3

explanations of matter (the electron), the latter being, in his own words, a
policy, not a creed, on the nature of matter. That is why both father and son could
easily accept electron diffraction, since it did not seriously challenge, but rather
somehow confirm, their classical world-view. In a way, the Thomsons saw in
one of the tenets of the new quantum (i.e., discrete) mechanics, wave–particle
duality, confirmation of the classical notion of continuity.
J. J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron has always been historiographic-
ally problematic. As Isobel Falconer (1985, 1987, 1989) thoroughly showed, his
research, from his appointment as Professor of Experimental Physics in 1884,
had little to do with cathode rays. He was mainly interested in electric dis-
charges in tubes as a way of understanding the relationship between matter,
electricity, and chemical bonding. His interest in cathode rays only came about
after the discovery of X-rays in 1895. His electron – the corpuscle – was gradually
introduced into explanations of the conduction of electricity, the composition
of matter, and chemical bonding. The different uses of the electron were cru-
cial in determining its ontological status: first, in his attempts to obtain a com-
plete explanation for the conduction of electricity and the interaction between
electricity and matter, later (and only later) in its role as a subatomic particle.
The notion of the corpuscle also permeated his project on positive rays, which
he started around 1907, and in which he tried to emulate his experiments on
cathode rays in the search for some possible corpuscle of positive electricity. He
also made frequent incursions into the territories of chemistry, his 1923 book
The Electron in Chemistry being the highlight of these attempts. The broader pic-
ture of the uses of the electron in the first decades of the twentieth century can
be found in Buchwald & Warwick (2001).
This biographical sketch of the Thomsons, father and son, of the electron,
and of the ether and its Faraday tubes is set on a very particular stage: the
University of Cambridge and the Cavendish Laboratory. The book follows in
the footsteps of Andrew Warwick’s (2003a) Masters of Theory, wherein he uses
the pedagogical traditions of the Mathematical Tripos as the explanatory
tool to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the theoretical physics that
was done in that university at the end of the nineteenth century and begin-
ning of the twentieth. In that book, Warwick justified the particular way
Cambridge (and, by extension, British) physicists understood the new theory
of relativity as the almost inevitable outcome of local pedagogical régimes.
Here, we shall find a somewhat analogous story in the case of the early the-
ory of the quantum. J. J. Thomson’s reaction to the emergence of the new
theory, one that challenged the very essence of what science was for him,
may be easily interpreted as paradigmatic of a generation of scientist for
whom physical explanations had to involve some kind of mental model. Less
4 Introduction

obvious is G. P. Thomson’s case. Trained in Cambridge in the years immedi-

ately before the Great War, he was a contemporary of Niels Bohr and could
have, in principle, played an active role in the reception and development of
quantum physics in Britain, more so when we consider how his experiments
on electron diffraction constituted proof of one of the most counterintuitive
principles of the new physics. But, as we shall see, he did not construe his
work as an experimentum crucis standing between the old and the new phys-
ics, but merely the confirmation that an explanation in corpuscular/discrete
terms only was not enough to resolve the problems of radiation and account
for the identity of subatomic particles.
Cambridge will also figure in an unexpected way. After his graduation,
G. P. Thomson joined his father in pursuing a research project on the nature of
positive rays, one that began as an attempt to understand the nature of posi-
tive electrification, later to evolve into a technique of chemical analysis. After
the Great War, during which father and son each worked on different military-
related projects, they went back to working together again. I shall refrain from
making psychological speculations on the kind of emotional dependency the
son had on the father, for which we do not have specific evidence. What is
of interest is that this reunion happened at a time when J. J. Thomson had
been encouraged to step down as director of the Cavendish Laboratory after
35 years’ tenure, and that the collaboration did not cease even when, in 1922,
G. P. Thomson was appointed as a professor at the University of Aberdeen. As
I shall argue in Chapter 6, the son used this first opportunity he had of run-
ning a research laboratory, however small it was, to replicate in Aberdeen the
experimental set-up he had with his father in Cambridge, virtually turning his
laboratory into an extension of his father’s old rooms at the Cavendish.
There is one last parallel between the father’s and the son’s experimental
work on electrons that I highlight in this book. As we shall see in Chapter 3,
J. J. Thomson had been working on electrical discharges in tubes filled with
gases for over ten years when X-rays appeared on the stage. The latter were
obtained in cathode-ray tubes, i.e., evacuated tubes, and Thomson’s experi-
mental setting could rather easily be modified to analyse the new X-rays and
the old cathode rays. His famous experiments of 1897 were, in a way, the ser-
endipitous outcome of a long project that had positively avoided the use of
cathode rays. Similarly, in 1923, Louis de Broglie suggested that electrons, and
indeed any other particle, could be understood as possessing a dual nature:
wave and particle. In the summer of 1926, many British physicists learnt of
de Broglie’s theory and Schrödinger’s developments in quantum mechanics,
and it so happened that G. P. Thomson was in a privileged situation to put this
principle to the test. His experimental set-up in Aberdeen for studying positive
 Introduction 5

rays could, again, rather easily be adapted to take pictures of the possible
diffraction of cathode rays through thin metallic films. Both the discovery of
the electron by the father and that of its diffraction by the son were possible
thanks to the quick modification of experimental set-ups originally meant for
other projects.
Whether matter and radiation are by nature continuous or discrete are cen-
tral considerations in this book. But I shall also discuss the continuity, or lack
thereof, between scientific disciplines, specifically between physics and chem-
istry, and the nascent field of physical chemistry. The emergence of the last is
largely related to the explanatory power of electrons for chemical bonds. In
Chapter 2, we shall find, however, that, from the early 1880s, J. J. Thomson
had in mind the idea of uniting physics and chemistry under the common
umbrella of the physical sciences, on both the conceptual and the institutional
levels. That particular project did not succeed, but it revises the customary
image of J. J. Thomson, who can be understood better as a practitioner of the
physical sciences than simply as a physicist. This will also become evident in
Chapter 5, when we find the Thomsons’ project on positive rays developing
into an experimental method of chemical analysis.
Now it is time for acknowledgements and expressions of gratitude. Lest the
reader be bored, I shall only mention those who had a very active role in the
genesis of this book, starting with Andrew Warwick, who has lent much-needed
support at various stages of this project. I should also like to mention Simon
Schaffer and Richard Noakes, in Cambridge, and Massimiliano Badino and Shaul
Katzir, of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, for their insight-
ful ideas and their very helpful advice, as well as the ideas I received from con-
versations with Hasok Chang and Isobel Falconer, among others. I also want to
thank Sebastian Hew for his patient and thoughtful editing of my writing. I am
indebted to staff at the following archives for their help and for granting per-
mission to work and cite from their materials: Cambridge University Library
(CUL), Royal Society (RSA), Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI), University of
Aberdeen (UAb), Trinity College and Churchill College. Lastly, I want to thank
Mr David Thomson, son of G. P. Thomson and grandson of J. J. Thomson, for
his time and help, and for permission to quote from his father’s archives and
autobiography in Trinity College, Cambridge.
 1

The early years in Manchester

and Cambridge

1.1 Manchester

Chimneys are the main architectural element that characterize our

first destination, Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century. Chimneys have
dwarfed the bell towers of the old provincial town, and the clangour of the
looms has silenced the bells. The power of the steam engine, of the free mar-
ket, and of enterprise has transformed the city into the centre of what we
now call the Industrial Revolution: a landscape of chimneys, like those later
portrayed in the paintings of L. S. Lowry, ceaselessly belching smoke into the
always-humid air of the Lancashire region. As a contemporary observer put it,
‘the clouds of smoke vomited forth from the numberless chimneys, Labour
presents a mysterious activity, somewhat akin to the subterraneous action of a
volcano’ (Fraucher, 1844, p. 2).
Smoke from the factories mingled with steam, with clouds, and with fog, form-
ing all sorts of capricious combinations of fluids and giving rise to playful shapes
in the atmosphere. In the mid-nineteenth century, the citizen of Manchester
was constantly breathing the insalubrious air created by the industrial machin-
ery: an air that imbued everything in the city, impregnating clothes, buildings
and the deep corners of every lung, with terrible odours, dirt and all sorts of
diseases. Not only did the Manchester air, like that other entity of Victorian
science, ether, permeate many aspects of life, irrespective of social class or age,
it was also the source of awe for those interested in the study of fluids, their
mixtures, their shapes and forms, and their diffusion through solid bodies. The
skies in Manchester became a privileged environment wherein to observe the
behaviour of smoke rings, diffusion patterns, and condensation phenomena, all
of which were part of the interest of the Victorian men of science.

6
 1.1 Manchester 7

The better-off classes were also fortunate to experience the different concen-
trations of that air, since they tended to live in the suburbs of the city, where
the atmosphere was significantly cleaner. In a most poignant description made
in 1844, Friedrich Engels pointed out the fact that ‘Outside, beyond this girdle,
lives the upper and middle bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid
out streets in the vicinity of the working quarters … the upper bourgeoisie in
remoter villas with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights
of Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air,
in fine, comfortable homes’ (Engels, 1845/1887).
The ubiquitous chimneys were only the tip of the iceberg of the changes that
Manchester underwent in the early nineteenth century. In less than a hundred
years, the city became the region with the highest density of population in
England, seeing a ten-fold increase in the number of inhabitants. The following
figures speak for themselves: the population grew from about 24 000 in 1773 to
over 300 000 in 1841. The figures, however, belie the most significant change
in the structure of the population. At the end of the eighteenth century, in the
Mancunian population there was a provincial elite of clergymen, physicians
and small-scale traders. By the mid-nineteenth century a growing bourgeoisie
of textile industrialists had replaced this elite.
Besides the old and new elites, thousands of working-class people were
crammed into neighbourhoods built specifically for them where they lived in
subhuman conditions. The descriptions of Friedrich Engels, however exagger-
ated they may be, give us a vivid account of the landscape: ‘Of the irregular
cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan, of the
tangle in which they are crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible
to convey an idea … the confusion has only recently reached its height when
every scrap of space left by the old way of building has been filled up and
patched over until not a foot of land is left to be further occupied’. And with
this chaotic and very dense concentration of human beings came the highest
degree of filth and insalubrious conditions: ‘In dry weather, a long string of
the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank,
from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give
forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the sur-
face of the stream’ (Engels 1845/1887). The social structure of Manchester and
its division of labour was also embodied in the strict separation between the
different neighbourhoods:

The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for
years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a
working-people’s quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as
8 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This arises

chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well
as with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people’s
quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved
for the middle-class; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed
with the cloak of charity … And the finest part of the arrangement
is this, that the members of this money aristocracy can take the
shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their
places of business without ever seeing that they are in the midst of
the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left.

This social structure has also strong parallelisms with the main entity of
Victorian physics: the ether. If the mixture of smoke, fog, and air created a priv-
ileged image for the structure of the ether, the social structure of Manchester
resembled the relationship between ether and the material world. The working
class, together with the coal, would have been the invisible power behind the
rise in production. The consumer, the middle and upper classes, would only see
the result of the process, without getting into the minutiae of the conditions
of the working class, their activities, and their work. Analogously, the invis-
ible ether would permeate the activities of the visible world, being the see for
diverse forms of energy and, in some cases, also the see for the spiritual world.
The ether permeated the whole of the cosmos in Victorian science, and will be
present throughout this book. That is the reason for starting with these two
analogies that can be found in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester, the home-
town of Joseph John Thomson.

1.2 Science in Manchester

The profound changes in the social structure of Manchester triggered

in its citizens a transformation in their approach to science. At the end of the
eighteenth century, science was almost non-existent in Manchester. Located
between the scholarly centres of the south (Oxford, Cambridge and London)
and the north (Scotland), Manchester was something of an academic desert.
The Mancunian gentry were content with the less-than-exciting intellectual life
of local institutions, such as the parish halls, the libraries, the clubs, and the
amateur theatres. In just over 50 years, however, the panorama had changed
completely. Triggered by the new economic situation, science developed in
Manchester in the first decades of the nineteenth century basically because of
two factors. On the one hand, the development of industrial machinery and
technologies stimulated an army of engineers, chemists and other technical
 1.2 Science in Manchester 9

personnel, creating the need for spaces to exchange information. On the other
hand, some of the entrepreneurial traders and industrialists that populated
the city felt the need to relate to nature in a purer way than industry allowed.
This gave rise to a particular brand of savants of nature composed of successful
industrialists for whom the social status came from their philosophical interest
in nature, not from the money they made using its resources.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the only institution in which nat-
ural philosophy was somewhat present was the Manchester Literary and
Philosophical Society (the Lit & Phil), which originated in the last third of the
eighteenth century as informal meetings of mainly medical doctors and was
formally established in 1781 (Cardwell, 2003). Initially, the number of ordin-
ary members could not exceed 50, and these were elected on the grounds of
their residency in Manchester and surrounding areas, and most importantly,
on the basis of their literary or philosophical contributions. The meetings of
the society, and the subsequent Memoirs, dealt with topics such as natural philo-
sophy, chemistry, literature, civil law, commerce and the arts. Excluded from
these debates were British politics, religion, and the practice of medicine in an
attempt to avoid belligerent disputes among the members of the Society. In
due course, other scientific institutions appeared in Manchester: in 1821, the
Natural History Society was established, and soon after the Royal Manchester
Institution; in 1825, the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution; in 1829, the New
Mechanics’ Institution; in 1839, the Salford Mechanics’ Institution; in 1834, the
Statistics Society, and in 1838 the Manchester Geological Society. However, the
Lit & Phil maintained pre-eminence over the rest.
Most members of the Lit & Phil were amateur intellectuals. They had their
jobs as doctors, chemists, industrialists or tradesmen, but devoted part of their
time to the gentle cultivation of the sciences or the arts. Among this very ama-
teur and dilettante tradition, and in contrast with it, we find the best-known
Mancunian natural philosopher, John Dalton, a self-trained natural philoso-
pher, who became a member of the Society in 1794 and presided over it from
1817 until his death in 1844.
Dalton’s background and attitude towards science meant a first turning
point in the nature of the Lit & Phil. He was not a well-established professional,
nor did he come from a bourgeois background. He was born into a family of
religious dissenters, for whom many educational institutions were, at the time,
banned. He started his career in the context of Quaker educational institutions,
and arrived in Manchester as a teacher of natural philosophy in a newly cre-
ated college. His work on meteorology soon gave him local prestige, a prestige
he used to become a full-time man of science. The members of the Lit & Phil
agreed to let Dalton work in rooms of the Society, which he equipped at his
10 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

own expense, and from which he emerged as an internationally renowned nat-

ural philosopher. It was in the setting of the Lit & Phil that Dalton developed
his atomic theory of matter, giving precise, quantitative data on the proportion
of the different elements in chemical compounds. Dalton’s name would, for
evermore, be linked to the atomic theory of matter.
The importance of Dalton as an icon of Manchester science was particularly
clear during his funeral, on 12 August 1844, an event that was tailored by the
local authorities to signal Manchester as a place for first-rate natural philoso-
phy. According to the reporter in The Manchester Guardian, the chapel of rest,
installed in the Town Hall, was visited in one day ‘by no less than forty thousand
people’. In the procession to the cemetery, ‘nothing could be more gratifying
than the quiet, orderly behaviour, and the silent and respectful demeanour, of
the immense concourse of persons along the whole distance … The shops were
closed; ladies and gentlemen, in mourning, filled every window … Indeed, we
never saw in this community so general a wearing of mourning attire, crape,
&c.’ (The Manchester Guardian, Wednesday 14 August, 1844). Such ostentatious
display was condemned only by the Society of Friends, to which Dalton had
belonged.
Dalton was succeeded by James Prescott Joule as the icon of Mancunian sci-
ence. Born in 1818, Joule became, by the 1850s, its most visible face. The son of
a very successful Salford brewer, he was trained by Dalton in the mid-1830s and
did most of his science in the laboratory that he set up in his home. There he
developed the ideas and experiments that would eventually lead him to formu-
late his ideas on the transformation of different forms of energy, including the
paddle-wheel experiments for which he became known. ‘When I was a boy’,
Thomson recalled, ‘I was introduced by my father to Joule, and when he had
gone my father said, “Some day you will be proud to be able to say you have
met that gentleman”; and I am’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 10).
Joule spent every day from nine to six in the brewery, trading and deal-
ing with his father’s business. But his true calling was in his home laboratory,
among the electrical and chemical apparatus with which he was experiment-
ing. As soon as he could after his father’s death, he sold the brewery and fully
embraced his passion for science. Joule’s shift from amateur to professional
science is paradigmatic of Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century. Two
elements played a major role in the change of attitude towards science: first,
industry was growing, and its needs were more and more sophisticated. They
demanded a more professional approach, far from the idealism and seclusion
of men like Dalton. Second, the new bourgeoisie began to feel science was a
calling, and not an elegant pastime, and thought they had to become savants
of science, as if industrial activity was not pure enough. To follow their calling
 1.2 Science in Manchester 11

in science, they started as self-trained scientists (many were self-made busi-

nessmen). Their entrepreneurial drive included the research and publication
of cutting-edge scientific knowledge. In the words of historian R. H. Kargon,
‘this new group, generally from the less prestigious segments of the middle
class and sometimes self-made men, were devotees of science, who saw science
as their “calling” … These businessmen-savants, however, sought their identity
and … even their status in the scientific pursuit’ (Kargon, 1979, p. 35).
Under Joule’s influence, the meetings and the Memoirs of the Lit & Phil also
underwent dramatic changes in their scope and content. They became more
and more the forum for almost exclusively scientific papers. While, at the
beginning of the century, only 50% of papers in the Memoirs were related to
the sciences, by the middle of the century, this proportion was 95%, including
engineering, which increasingly occupied an important place in the meetings
of the Society. The revolution that was taking place in France and Germany,
where industry was increasingly collaborating with scientific institutions, was
also, although a bit late, coming to Manchester. Joule managed to change the
regulations of the Memoirs of the Lit & Phil so that it became a scientific jour-
nal tout court, including the dates of the reception of manuscripts, and de facto
excluding all literary articles. In due course, the naturalist devotee was to give
way to a totally professional practitioner of science. Unlike their predecessors,
however, this new group of scientists became established in Manchester after
they were trained in other British and European research centres. Their pri-
mary task was to overcome the remnants of amateurism that still pervaded in
Manchester and to establish and consolidate scientific institutions in the city.
Many devotees also saw in their scientific endeavours a somewhat religious
mission. As an example, we can reproduce the notes that Joule prepared for
his speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting
of 1873:

The great object which natural science has in view is to elevate man
in the scale of intellectual creatures by the exercise of the highest
faculties of his nature in developing the wonders of the glorious
creation. The second and subsidiary object is to promote the well
being and comfort of mankind to increase his luxuries. These objects
are closely allied and should not be separated. The benefit to be
attained is for the entire man, for his soul, his mind, his body. The
importance of this object is measured by the importance of that part
of human nature which is beneficially affected. The first object is
therefore at least as much more important than the second as the
intellect is more noble than the body … And yet it is evident that an
12 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

acquaintance with nature’s law means no less than an acquaintance

with the mind of God therein expressed. This acquaintance brings us
nearer to him… (Kargon, 1979, pp. 55–6).

Dalton and Joule were the two best-known physicists of nineteenth-century

Manchester. The first became internationally renowned for his work in sup-
port of the existence of atoms as corpuscles of matter; the latter became the
icon of the conservation and transformation of different forms of energy. Both
concepts eventually became central to the scientific career of J. J. Thomson,
who became known for the discovery of the corpuscle-electron while retaining
a metaphysical framework in which the conservation of energy in the ether
played a crucial role. At the very beginning of his memoirs Thomson, a proud
Mancunian, pointed at the relevance of these two names in the configuration
of science in Manchester: ‘Manchester has played a prominent part in the his-
tory of physical science, for, in it, in the first half of the nineteenth century,
Dalton made the experiments which led him to the discovery of the law of mul-
tiple proportion in chemical combination, and Joule those which were instru-
mental in establishing the principle of the Conservation of Energy’ (Thomson,
1936, p. 7). J. J. was to think of himself as the one who was able to unify these
concepts.

1.3 Thomson’s early days

Joseph John Thomson was born in December 1856 in Cheetham, one of

those Manchester suburbs accommodating the local middle-class bourgeoisie
of which Engels spoke in his description of the city. His father, Joseph James,
ran a modest publishing and bookselling business that three generations earl-
ier one Ebenezer Thomson had founded in Manchester. His mother’s name was
Emma Swindells. The family would be completed two years later with the birth
of J. J.’s only brother, Frederick Vernon.
Little is known about J. J.’s life as a child. The only information we have are
the recollections he recorded in his autobiography, written around the age of
80. However, a few points are relevant for the present story. Thomson was born
into a middle-class family, and educated in a local school. ‘After going for a year
or two to a small school for young boys and girls, kept by two maiden ladies
who were friends of my mother’, he wrote, ‘I went to a private day school kept
by two brothers named Townsend, at Alms Hill, Cheetham, which was near
to where I lived’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 2). In the British context, this needs to be
emphasized, since it was not uncommon for the offspring of the establishment
to be educated, from an early age, in the prestigious boarding public schools
 1.3 Thomson’s early days 13

scattered all over the country. Education in that kind of establishments was a
good starting point from which to gain access to the traditional universities
of the country. Thomson was not, therefore, on the right track from which to
start an academic career.
As we shall see in Chapter 5, later in life, J. J. Thomson became very active
in educational policies, with very strong views on the way children should be
taught. He looked back with a certain sense of nostalgia on some of the aspects
of his earlier education, especially the promotion of the use of memory. He
was glad to have studied Latin following the Eton Latin Grammar, which was
written in verse, so that it was easier to memorize, even though the meaning
of words was not always clear. In English, he had to learn by heart fragments
of the works of keynote authors such as Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott. The
syllabus also included some history and a great deal of arithmetic, which ‘is
an excellent intellectual gymnastic, for it is easy to set simple questions which
cannot be solved by rule of thumb, but require thought’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 4).
There was almost nothing of the natural sciences at school, except for the col-
lection of some animal and botanical species. Thomson, however, from a very
early age cultivated the Victorian hobby of growing rare species of flowers,
‘and thought that when I grew up I should like to be a botanist’ (Thomson,
1936, p. 6). His son confirmed that, besides physics, his father’s other passion
in Cambridge was his garden (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 55). We also know that he
possessed a small microscope his father had given him as a present.
Life in the Thomson household seems to have been pleasant, with the nor-
mal comforts of a Victorian middle class family. Because of his occupation,
Thomson’s father was relatively well connected to the intellectual elite of the
city, which gave the young J. J. the opportunity to meet some local great men
like James Joule. Everything changed, however, with the death of his father
when J. J. was just 16. Although they received help from many friends, the fam-
ily had to move to a smaller house and their straightened circumstances meant
that J. J.’s younger brother was unable to receive the same education as J. J.
Thomson seems to have been very fond of his brother Fred, who took on the
responsibility of looking after their mother when J. J. left for Cambridge. Fred
worked in a local calico merchant company with strong connections in the USA
and lived with his mother until her death in 1902, normally meeting with J. J.
in the summer vacation. In 1914, he fell seriously ill and J. J. suggested that he
should move to Cambridge, so that he and his wife could look after him. Fred
rented a house near his brother’s until his death three years later, in 1917. The
affection of J. J. for his brother was very obvious, and he ‘always personally
carried a wreath to his grave at Christmas for 21 years, after which he was no
longer physically able to do so’ (Rayleigh, 1942, p. 185).
14 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

1.4 Owens College

In spite of his early passion for botany, Thomson, like so many young
people in Manchester, intended to become an engineer. At the time, there
was no such thing as an academic career in engineering in Britain, and the
only way to become one was through hands-on training as an apprentice in an
engineering company. However, due to the existence of a long waiting list for
such positions, his father decided to send him to Owens College at the age of
13. There, he proved his abilities in pure science, which drew the attention of
one of his teachers, Thomas Baker, himself a former Cambridge graduate, who
eventually encouraged him to sit for a fellowship at Trinity College. Actually,
Thomson was not the first Owens student to go to Cambridge. The year he
started at Owens, John Hopkinson, who had also studied at the college, gradu-
ated as senior wrangler – the highest honour – in Cambridge, which gave Owens
College much prestige. This seems to have been a strong argument to convince
people such as Mr Thomson to send their children to Owens.
J. J. was also grateful for the opportunity to go to Owens College, and saw
this ‘accident’ as ‘the most critical event in my life and which determined my
career’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 2), since the college was a unique institution, unpar-
allelled in Britain, both for the scope of its education and for the young age
at which students could be admitted. The curriculum at Owens was very dif-
ferent from that of most British schools, since it stressed the importance of
engineering, experimental physics and chemistry and put less emphasis on the
humanities and mathematical physics (Kargon, 1979, pp. 157–96). The goal of
the junior school which J. J. attended was to prepare young students for the for-
mal study of the natural sciences, with an eye to training scientists who would,
directly or indirectly, make a difference to the development of Manchester’s
scientific and industrial network.
What kind of institution was Owens College? From the 1830s, a number of
influential people advocated the idea of setting up a university in the industrial
and commercial city of Manchester as the necessary culmination of the great
development of the metropolis. However, it only materialized after the death
of John Owens, a wealthy Manchester merchant whose will included a large
sum of money to be used for the establishment of a university in Manchester.
In 1851, Owens College became a reality, as a college affiliated to the University
of London. In the beginning, three chairs were created: one for classics, one for
mathematics and natural philosophy, and a third one for mental and moral
philosophy and English, following the patterns of traditional universities.
There were also part-time appointments in chemistry, in botany, zoology and
botany (natural history), in German and in French.
 1.4 Owens College 15

Although the chemistry appointment was only part-time initially, chemis-

try eventually evolved into one of the key areas at Owens College, partly due
to the tradition started by Dalton and continued by Joule, but also partly due
to the technological needs of the many industries in the region. Nevertheless,
the establishment of an academically serious department of chemistry was
not without obstacles. The first professor, Edward Frankland, had trained with
two of the major figures in mid-nineteenth century chemistry (in Marburg,
under Robert W. Bunsen, and in Giessen under Justus Liebig), and he had
great expectations of replicating something like Liebig and Bunsen’s labora-
tories in Manchester. Although, at first, his was only a part-time appointment,
Frankland managed to organize a chemistry laboratory and wanted to empha-
size the importance of his discipline, not only for practical industrial and med-
ical reasons (which suited potential Manchester students very well) but also
for the pursuit of knowledge per se. He tried to ‘recommend the science [of
chemistry] for its own intrinsic excellence, for the intellectual delight which
every student must find in its pursuit and for the bright glimpses of the Deity
which it discloses at every step’ (Kargon, 1979, p. 159). But Frankland did not
succeed in establishing a research department, partly because the few students
he had seemed to be interested only in ‘testing the “Soda-ash” and “Bleaching
Powder”’(Frankland to Bunsen, cited in Kargon (1979 p. 164), and, tired and
disappointed, he decided to leave the college in 1857.
Henry Enfield Roscoe was Frankland’s successor in the chair of chemistry.
He had also trained with Bunsen and Liebig in Germany, where he learnt of
the benefits of research laboratories with links to commercial enterprises. He
succeeded in using Frankland’s initial impetus to build, over the course of ten
years, a school of chemistry with higher quality theoretical and experimental
training, industrial links, and original research. A second chair in chemistry
was created in 1874, and Carl Shorlemmer, Roscoe’s assistant, born and trained
in Germany, was appointed, turning chemistry into a central science at Owens.
In his Recollections of 1936, Thomson attributed the success of Owens to Roscoe’s
interest in promoting education in the sciences, acknowledging that ‘By the
time he left Owens, its Chemical Department had become the best organized
and the best equipped in the country, attended by over a hundred students’. A
main reason for this success was that ‘Roscoe did much by his own personal
efforts to promote the application of science to industry. The manufacturers in
Lancashire believed in him and were constantly coming to consult him as to
the way they should get over difficulties which had cropped up in their work’
(Thomson, 1936, p. 29). Roscoe had also become interested, while in Germany,
in the new science of spectroscopy, a field that proved very successful in the
last decades of the nineteenth century. His book on the analysis of spectra
16 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

turned out to be quite influential in the laboratories engaged in spectroscopic

techniques, one of which from the late 1870s onwards was, as we shall see in
Chapter 2, the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge.
But let us go back to 1857. Only six years after the opening of the college,
the decline in the number of students proved that more encouragement was
needed to attract the middle classes into higher education. In Manchester,
the offspring of the emergent middle class were mainly interested in prac-
tical training and short-term profit, and few people enrolled in fundamental
research. Only slowly did the ruling class in Manchester, and the authorities at
Owens, realize that the college could neither aspire to compete with the trad-
itional liberal education of Oxford and Cambridge, nor content itself with pro-
viding superficial vocational training. The French, and especially the German,
scientific institutions were improving their techniques and productivity at a
faster pace than the British, thanks to a radically new way of merging academic
research and industrial interests, and this was the pattern that Owens College
tried to follow after 1857 (Sviedrys, 1976; Gooday, 1990; Turner, 1993). Also in
that year, it was decided to start a junior school associated with the college, the
main purpose of which was to get people interested in fundamental research
from a younger age. This was the school in which J. J. Thomson enrolled in
1870. In 1873, Thomson saw his college move into new buildings on Oxford
Street, whose neo-gothic architecture expressed the merging of industry, com-
merce, training and research.
The academic staff that J. J. found in the junior college were extraordinary for
a teenager engineer-to-be: in the chair in mathematics, Thomas Baker, a senior
wrangler and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; in engineering, Osborne
Reynolds, who had also been trained in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos
after an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering; in physics, Balfour Stewart,
who came from the Scottish universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh; and in
chemistry, the aforementioned Roscoe and Schorlemmer. In his autobiography,
Thomson recalled the influences that he received from all of them.
From Baker, he received his first instruction in advanced mathematics, which
enabled him to learn about the newly introduced quaternionic notation long
before he attended Cambridge. Thus, from his early days, Thomson was accus-
tomed to using powerful analytical tools in the solution of physical problems,
a tradition that he would certainly develop in the Cambridge Mathematical
Tripos. Reynolds was a seventh wrangler, but had had a four-year apprentice-
ship in engineering before going to Cambridge. He was appointed to the newly
created chair of engineering at Owens in 1868. Thomson described him in his
autobiography as ‘one of the most original and independent of men, and never
did anything or expressed himself like anybody else’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 15).
 1.4 Owens College 17

Taking notes during his lectures proved to be almost impossible, and the stu-
dents had to rely on the well-known textbooks by the Scottish physicist and
engineer William J. N. Rankine’s textbooks; but it was also evident to them
that Reynolds had a very original and independent mind. Since Thomson was
initially waiting to be admitted to an apprenticeship in engineering, he spent a
lot of time with him in the early years.
But as some historians have emphasized, it was Balfour Stewart who
probably most influenced Thomson at Owens College (Davis & Falconer, 1997,
p. 6; see also Crowther, 1974; Chayut, 1991). On the one hand, he introduced
J. J. to Maxwell’s recent Treatise of Electricity and Magnetism (Maxwell, 1873),
arousing his interest in this science. On the other hand, Stewart was passion-
ate about teaching in the laboratory, and he introduced Thomson into hands-
on practical research. They spent long hours together, engaged in laboratory
work, trying, for instance, to detect a change of weight in chemical reactions,
with even an accident taking place in which Thomson apparently nearly lost
his sight. Although Stewart was formally a professor of physics, his research
topics were at the boundary between physics and chemistry, which contrib-
uted to Thomson’s idea that both disciplines were part of a bigger whole.
For example, Stewart organized practical courses for three kinds of students,
including those ‘who wish to confine themselves to those branches of Physics
most allied to Chemistry’ (Chayut, 1991, p. 532). In his study of Thomson’s
inclination towards chemistry, Sinclair emphasized that Stewart’s ideas on
the conservation of energy, the constitution of matter, the nature of the ether
and of the atoms, etc. were extremely influential on J. J., which explains why
he always saw many physical problems ‘in something of a chemical light’
(Sinclair, 1987, p. 91).
J. J.’s time in this institution did not pass unnoticed. His abilities in the sci-
ences gained him several local prizes and scholarships, such as the Ashbury
Engineering Scholarship, the Dalton Junior and Senior Mathematical
Scholarships and the Engineering Essay Prize (Rayleigh, 1942, p. 6), all of which
helped him to continue his studies at Owens after the death of his father. It was
also during his time at Owens that he produced his first scientific paper, an
experimental work to measure the electrical displacement when two non-con-
ductors were put into contact, which was published in the Proceedings of the Royal
Society, under the patronage of Balfour Stewart. This paper shows only the tip
of the iceberg of the uniqueness of J. J.’s training before moving to Cambridge,
for it demonstrates that Thomson had a much deeper scientific training, both
in mathematical and in experimental physics, than most of his peers at the uni-
versity. His exposure to experimental science would prove particularly signifi-
cant after his years as an undergraduate in Cambridge, where all his training
18 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

had an exclusively theoretical character, when, after graduating, he decided to

complement his training with the acquisition of more experimental skills and
he, eventually, eventually as Cavendish professor.
This particular early training would, however, prove to be a hindrance for
entering Cambridge. Thomson failed at his first attempt due to his excessively
scientific education, which had left some more basic areas, especially in the
humanities, unattended. The feedback he got from the examination stated that
he ‘should have done better if, instead of reading the higher subjects in math-
ematics which were not included in the examination, [he] had concentrated on
getting a “thorough grounding” in the lower ones’. The following is Thomson’s
later ironic description of what this ‘thorough grounding’ meant: ‘reading the
subjects included in the entrance scholarship examinations over and over again,
and doing a great number of trivial examples in them’. Furthermore, ‘in some
cases the boys, who were to be sent in to compete for entrance scholarships,
did little in the two years before the examination but to write out answers to
papers set in previous examinations. Under this system the boys get more and
more fed-up with mathematics the longer they are at it’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 31).
As Andrew Warwick showed, the system of training young boys by repetition
of case studies and previous examinations used in most public schools had its
roots in the Cambridge pedagogical system itself (Warwick, 2003a, pp. 254–
64). Once again, let us emphasize that Thomson did not arrive in Cambridge
from this public school tradition, but from the unique early training at Owens
College.

1.5 The Unseen Universe

Before we move on to examine Thomson’s time in Cambridge, let us

look at another factor that was present during Thomson’s many hours in the
laboratory with Stewart. The mixture of smoke and humidity that perme-
ated the atmosphere in industrial Manchester is a compelling image of one
important aspect in the world-view of Victorian scientists: the world of mat-
ter was equally permeated by an entity – the ether – which was a major seat
of energy and interactions, and the medium for the transmission of light. The
ether was supposed to be weightless but, at the same time, rigid enough to
transmit light waves. The question about the relationship between ordinary
matter and ether, between matter and energy, was at its speculative peak
in the second half of the nineteenth century, giving the ether some of the
attributes of science fiction among the educated public. Science made its
existence necessary; its characteristics made it open to mystery and to all
manner of speculation.
 1.5 The Unseen Universe 19

Balfour Stewart used this cosmological idea to write, in 1875, together with
Peter Guthrie Tait, a bestseller on natural theology, called The Unseen Universe.
Thomson would recall that ‘Stewart had a strong turn for metaphysics’, which
explained the publication of a book that ‘was an attempt to find a physical basis
for immortality’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 22). Taking ether as the ultimate reality
in Nature, Tait and Stewart tried to prove the immortality of the soul and the
possible existence of many spiritual entities (but not the existence of a Creator,
which they took for granted). The main idea was that the world as we know it,
the ‘visible universe’ as they put it, was only a minor part, contingent and finite
in time, of a greater universe, the Unseen Universe, which included all created
things. ‘We maintain that the visible universe – that is to say the universe of
atoms – must have had its origin in time, and that while THE UNIVERSE is, in
its widest sense, both eternal and infinite, the universe of atoms certainly can-
not have existed from all eternity’ (Stewart & Tait, 1875, p. 9). In this context,
the atoms of matter would be a transient entity: ‘We are not led to assert the
eternity of stuff or matter, for that would denote an unauthorized application
to the invisible universe of the experimental law of the conservation of mat-
ter which belongs entirely to the present system of things’ (p. vii); or, to put it
more bluntly, ‘it appears no less false to pronounce eternal that aggregation we
call the atom, than it would be to pronounce eternal that aggregation we call
the sun’ (p. vi).
Matter was regarded as a non-fundamental entity in the complete universe,
but only as an ephemeral phenomenon of the visible universe. Here they intro-
duce a distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘substantive’ reality, saying that,
while atoms have both types of reality, the unseen world of ether is ‘objective’
but not ‘substantive’, an idea that can only be understood in the light of the
science of energy that crystallized in the previous decades: ‘It is only within
the last thirty or forty years that there has gradually dawned upon the minds
of scientific men the conviction that there is something besides matter or
stuff in the physical universe’ (Stewart & Tait, 1875, p. 100). And, continuing
with the same kind of rhetoric, they take energy as this ‘something’ besides
matter: ‘Taking as our “system of bodies” the whole physical universe, we
now see that … energy has as much claim to be regarded as an objective real-
ity as matter itself’ (p. 114–5). In Tait and Stewart’s views, there was, how-
ever, an ontological asymmetry between matter and ether, for the latter was
considered to be more fundamental than the former. This is consistent with
such cosmologies as the one implicit in the vortex atom theory of William
Thomson, which assumed atoms to be explainable in terms of vortices in the
ether, and which became, in Kragh’s expression, a ‘theory of everything’ in
Victorian science (Kragh, 2002). However, they felt that they had to introduce
20 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

a fundamental change in the conditions of the ether. In W. Thomson’s theory,

the primordial fluid – the ether – was seen as perfect, and the appearance of
the vortex rings as the result of some external (divine) action on it. For Stewart
and Tait, this would not accomplish the conditions of a self-sustained ‘Unseen
Universe’. Therefore, they regarded the ether as a non-perfect fundamental
fluid, in which the vortices appear and disappear as a result of spontaneous
fluctuations. In this way, the visible world would be ephemeral ‘just as the
smoke-ring which we develop from air … is ephemeral, the only difference
being in duration, these lasting only a few seconds, and the others it may be
for billions of years’ (Stewart & Tait, 1875, p. 157).
This holistic idea was not characteristic only of Stewart and Tait: late
nineteenth-century science was overenthusiastic about the possibilities of redu-
cing all knowledge to one metaphysical principle from which all phenomena,
including the spiritual, would be deduced (Harman, 1982; Myers, 1989; Smith,
1998; Noakes, 2005). The Unseen Universe is only one example of a ‘growing com-
mitment to a belief in the uniformity of nature, the restriction of divine action
to the creation of the universe, the rejection of suppositions of divine interven-
tions to explain apparent discontinuities in the natural world, and the separ-
ation of the natural and the supernatural’ (Heimann, 1972, p. 75). The interest
of this book, as far as J. J. Thomson is concerned, resides not only in the fact that
it was a best-seller among those with interests in science and natural philoso-
phy, but mainly in the fact that Stewart was writing this book precisely in the
years when J. J. spent long hours in the laboratory under his guidance, and this
must have certainly exerted a direct influence on him (Sinclair, 1987, p. 90).
As Davis and Falconer stated, Thomson received from Stewart a thorough
grounding in the prevalent Victorian method of reasoning by analogy and in
ether physics (Davis & Falconer, 1997, p. 6; see also Chayut, 1991).
Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Thomson was directly involved in
the Society for Psychical Research, a society devoted to the scientific study of
paranormal phenomena, something to which some aspects of the physics of
the ether were particularly suited. For the time being, it suffices to quote from
a public lecture he gave in his hometown in 1907 in which he explained the
relationship between ether and matter, between electricity and mechanics, in
a language suited to his audience, mixing the physical, the mercantile and the
mysterious:

The study of the problems brought before us by recent investigations

leads us to the conclusion that ordinary material systems must be
connected with invisible systems which possess mass whenever the
material systems contain electrical charges. If we regard all matter
 1.6 Undergraduate in Cambridge 21

as satisfying this condition we are led to the conclusion that the

invisible universe – the ether – is to a large extent the workshop
of the material universe, and that the phenomena of nature as we
see them are fabrics woven in the looms of this unseen universe
(Thomson 1907f, p. 21).

1.6 Undergraduate in Cambridge

While Owens College was a new institution born in a lively city

and promoted by the same entrepreneurial bourgeoisie that was develop-
ing Manchester’s industry, Cambridge was a completely different world. The
model of science in that ancient and aristocratic university was mathematical
physics, the teaching of which was organized around the Mathematical Tripos.
Eminent Victorian scientists such as John Herschel, William Whewell, George
G. Stokes, William Thomson, Peter G. Tait and James Clerk Maxwell had all
been Mathematical Tripos students. Without completely denying the import-
ance of observation and experimentation, the ideal science in Cambridge was
one in which data and theories had achieved a complete mathematical for-
mulation, which could then be turned into the starting-point for the solution
to new problems. Whewell, the influential Master of Trinity College, worked
to emphasize the role of mathematical training in Cambridge in the mid-
nineteenth century. As he put it in 1837, the progress of the sciences ‘depends
on the distinctness of certain fundamental ideas; and these ideas, being first
clearly brought into view by the genius of great discoverers, become after-
wards the inheritance of all who thoroughly acquire the knowledge which is
thus made accessible’ (Whewell, 1837, p. 20). The role of university training in
the sciences was, from this perspective, the transmission of fixed principles or
fundamental ideas, and the usual work was to deductively develop new con-
sequences of such principles by means of reasoning and mathematical work
(Williams, 1990). With this model in mind, the experimental sciences appeared
as a kind of second-class knowledge. They were provisional and particular and
they lacked the rigour of mathematical formulation.
With the increasing specialization of the different sciences, however,
Cambridge accepted the need to create a new tripos of experimental science,
and, in 1851, the Natural Science Tripos was established. The chairs involved in this
tripos were, at first, chemistry, experimental natural philosophy, mineralogy,
geology, comparative anatomy, physiology, and botany. Physics, being at the
core of the Mathematical Tripos, was not, at the beginning, part of the Natural
Science Tripos, thus embodying the Whewellian distinction between adult and
under-aged sciences. Only with the establishment of the Cavendish Laboratory
22 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

did experimental physics enter the Natural Science Tripos, and, when Thomson
went to Cambridge in 1876, physics was being taught, although from radically
different perspectives, in both the Mathematical and Natural Science Triposes.
However, it was still the case that the Mathematical Tripos had a much greater
prestige in Cambridge, and it was the one that promising students like J. J. were
expected to follow (Roberts, 1989).
Thomson arrived in Cambridge in October 1876 and, as he put it in his auto-
biography, “kept” every term since then, and [was] in residence for some part
of each Long Vacation’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 34), which means that he never left
Cambridge for more than a few weeks after his arrival at the age of 19. After his
first failed attempt to enter Cambridge, Thomson prepared himself again for
the examination and, on 18 April, 1876, he resat the examination to get a fel-
lowship at the most prestigious of Cambridge institutions: Trinity College. Only
the wealthiest colleges in Cambridge could afford to offer some scholarships
for brilliant students with meagre financial resources like Thomson. The exam-
ination consisted of two papers ‘confined to questions in Arithmetic, Geometry,
Algebra, Trigonometry, Conic sections treated both geometrically and analyt-
ically, the Elements of the Differential Calculus, and Mechanics as far as the
Dynamics of a particle included’ (CUR, 19 October 1875, p. 45), some of which
involved a serious mastery of advanced mathematics. He was one of six candi-
dates to win a ‘Minor Scholarship’, with a value of £75 a year. Just to give an
idea of the number of students awarded a scholarship, in the year 1876, there
were only 12 scholars out of 167 matriculating students at Trinity College (CUR,
21 November 1876). The following year he sat for a ‘Foundation Scholarship’,
a fellowship open to undergraduates of the college, which increased both his
income to £100 a year and his prestige in the college.
Life as an undergraduate in Cambridge was, and in some respects still is,
a unique experience. Even though the introduction of the new triposes, with
tighter syllabuses, was changing the face of the university, the long tradition
of liberal education made itself felt very prominently. Cambridge was not only
a place of academic learning, it was a factory of mass production of gentlemen
to serve the British Empire. That is why the strictly academic education went
hand in hand with a very intense social life, which included college celebra-
tions, sports tournaments, religious events, and a wide range of activities in
which the young men developed a particular savoir faire that turned them into
exemplary Victorians. Thomson found this new world attractive and he did not
seem to have many problems fitting in. At the time, the college fellowships pro-
vided their recipients with enough money to spend entertaining their friends
and colleagues in college, something that, in time, he would consider to be
essential for any Cambridge student.
 1.7 Second wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos 23

Thomson described his days as an undergraduate as ‘very pleasant but

uneventful’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 52), and, with a closer look at his recollections,
we can infer that this means he was very much work oriented and not specially
good at those activities undergraduates tended to value most: sports. The main
games in those days were cricket and football, and rowing was just becoming
increasingly popular. However, Thomson, like ‘the ordinary reading man who
was not particularly good at games, had not much chance of playing either
cricket or football … there was no room for the “rabbits”’ (p. 66). J. J., like most
of his peers got the necessary physical exercise by taking walks: ‘Between 2
and 4 in the afternoon, streams of undergraduates, two and two, might be seen
on all the roads within three or four miles of Cambridge … On Sundays many
went further afield and walked for five or six hours’. Occasionally he would
play a tennis match or some golf, sports that ‘only require two players and for
which it is generally possible to find an opponent nearly as bad as yourself so
that you don’t feel you are spoiling anyone’s game’ (p. 67). The confidence and
brilliance shown in his academic career certainly failed him in more prosaic
activities.
Chapel attendance was compulsory for certain festivities and events. It is
not easy to assess J. J.’s attitude towards religion. He came from an average
Anglican family, and there is no reason to assume either a rejection of reli-
gious practice, or an excessive religious fanaticism. As an example, in his auto-
biography, he amusingly told how difficult it was, at times, to attend the 7.30
a.m. service, since ‘though we got up early it was not quite early enough, and
the Chapel doors were shut before we could reach them’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 53).
As for entertainment in Cambridge, there was not much to do in the town.
The only theatre was open solely during Vacation, and the amateur drama
society of the university performed two plays per year. As for dancing, the
only such events were in May Week, partly due to the extremely low numbers
of young ladies around the university. These arrangements meant that a stu-
dent could seriously concentrate in his work, rather than getting distracted by
other activities.

1.7 Second wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos

The first port of call in the education of a Cambridge student was the
college tutor. He was responsible for guiding the student during his under-
graduate years, looking after his welfare in all the aspects of his life in the
university. The long tradition of liberal education in Cambridge meant that
there was no fixed syllabus, but the students were free to choose the courses
and lectures they wanted to attend. The tutor was responsible for guiding the
24 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

student in his choices among a sea of college, intercollegiate, and departmental

lectures. Thomson’s tutor, Mr J. M. Image, was a classicist, with little idea about
the intricacies of mathematics, and thus Thomson could choose the lectures
that most suited his interests and needs and avoid some lecturers, ‘the dullness
of some of [which] can hardly be imagined’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 44).
In Victorian Cambridge, however, candidates for the higher ranks in the
Mathematical Tripos underwent an intensive training under the guidance of
an independent coach, who made sure that his students read all the subjects
included in the examinations, something not easy considering the large num-
ber of subjects and the limited time to study them. Thomson, like many of his
contemporaries, was coached by the charismatic Edward Routh. The system
used by the coaches consisted of combining their lectures with very competi-
tive weekly targets in solving examination problems from previous years. The
training also included time constraints: ‘one week we could take as much time
as we pleased in solving the problems, the next we were expected to do them in
three hours, the time allowed for such a paper in the tripos’. The students sent
their papers for marking and a few days later ‘a complete solution of the paper
in Routh’s handwriting was placed in the pupil’s room, together with a list of
the marks each pupil had obtained. This introduced a sporting element, and
made us take more trouble over them than we should otherwise have done’
(Thomson, 1936, p. 38). This system of coaching created an army of mathemati-
cians who were convinced that any problem in physics could, in the end, be
studied using the powerful tools of modern mathematical analysis. The prob-
lem-solving pedagogy meant that the students only thought about how to solve
the problem, not about whether the problem was soluble or not.
Routh had been senior wrangler in 1854, beating James Clerk Maxwell in
the rankings. The following year, he was elected to a fellowship and lectureship
at Peterhouse (one of the colleges in Cambridge), and, from that position, he
became the most successful of Cambridge coaches: of the 990 wranglers who
graduated between 1862 and 1888, almost half were coached by Routh (includ-
ing 26 senior wranglers), while between 1865 and 1888, 80 per cent of the top
three wranglers were his pupils (Warwick, 2003a, p. 233). This made him the
most influential mathematician in Cambridge, far beyond any other professor
or college tutor. Thomson vividly recalled Routh’s lifestyle:

The regularity of Routh’s life was almost incredible; his occupation

during term time could be expressed as a mathematical function of
the time which had only one solution. I believe one who had attended
his lectures could have told what he had been lecturing upon at a
particular hour, and on a particular day, over a period of twenty-five
 1.7 Second wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos 25

years. The fact that year after year he gave the same lectures at the
same time did not make him stale as it would most people. He might,
as far as one could judge from his manner, have been delivering each
lecture for the first time. His way of taking exercise was as regular
as his lectures: every fine afternoon he started at the same time for
a walk along the Trumpington Road; went the same distance out,
turned and came back. His regularity was not, as might perhaps have
been expected, accompanied by formal and stereotyped manners;
these were very simple and kindly and we were all very fond of him
(Thomson, 1936, p. 40–1).

Historian Andrew Warwick has analysed the pedagogical tradition in Cambridge

and the particular role played by Maxwell’s Treatise of Electricity and Magnetism.
Published in 1873, just after his appointment as the first Cavendish Professor,
the Treatise was intended as a compendium of theoretical and experimental
approaches to electricity and magnetism, and developed Maxwell’s new views
on the field. The Treatise was, thus, thought of as a textbook to aid him in his
professorial role. In the hands of other people, however, making sense of the
Treatise proved a difficult task, since there was a lot of tacit knowledge, which
most readers would not necessarily have. That is why Cambridge students in
the late 1870s were in a privileged position to understand Maxwell’s work
even though, when doing so, they developed one particular understanding of
it. ‘The collective understanding of electromagnetic field theory that emerged
in Cambridge circa 1880 was shaped by a combination of the problem-solving
approach … and discussions at the intercollegiate lectures on the Treatise held
at Trinity College by W. D. Niven’ (Warwick, 2003a, p. 291). Outsiders, on the
other hand, lacking the pedagogical tools of Cambridge undergraduates, would
find it very difficult to make sense of the Treatise. An example of this is the
speed with which Thomson was able to develop important consequences of
Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory: ‘Where men like Heaviside and Fitzgerald
had taken years of private study to begin offering their own original contribu-
tions, Thomson wrote two important papers on electromagnetic theory within
months of graduating while working simultaneously on several other projects’
(p. 343; see Thomson, 1880 and 1881a).
After Routh, the aforementioned William D. Niven was the second most
influential person in Thomson’s education in Cambridge. Niven had been third
wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos in 1866 and, in 1874, was invited to return
to Trinity College as a lecturer in mathematics. In Cambridge he became a close
friend of Maxwell, to the extent that he considered himself as his intellectual
heir, especially after Maxwell’s untimely death in 1879. Niven was responsible
26 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

for the second edition of the Treatise as well as for editing the two volumes of
Maxwell’s scientific papers (Niven, 1890). Thus, he was the person to meet if
one wanted to understand the Treatise. His intercollegiate lectures, attended by
ambitious undergraduates and new wranglers, became the forum of discussion
of the new ideas (Warwick, 2003a, p. 317). Thomson would remember that the
importance of Niven’s lectures resided not so much in their clarity but in his
enthusiasm:

Niven was not a fluent lecturer nor was his meaning always clear, but
he was profoundly convinced of the importance of Maxwell’s views
and enthusiastic about them; he managed to impart his enthusiasm
to the class, and if we could not quite understand what he said about
certain points, we were sure that these were important and that
we must in some way or other get to understand them. This set us
thinking about them and reading and re-reading Maxwell’s book,
which itself was not always clear. This was an excellent education and
we got a much better grip of the subject, and greater interest in it,
than we should have got if the question had seemed so clear to us in
the lecture that we need not think further about it (Thomson, 1936,
p. 42–3).

William Niven became a lifelong friend of J. J. He ‘was one of the best and
kindest friends I ever had; he was very kind to me from the time I came up as
a freshman. He often asked me to go for walks with him. I went very often to
his rooms and, through him, I got to know many of the Fellows of the College’
(Thomson, 1936, p. 43). One sign of this close and long lasting friendship with
Niven is that he eventually became J. J.’s first son’s godfather.
Among the other lecturers in his undergraduate years, Thomson would
recall with particular affection J. W. L. Glaisher, whose lectures were ‘the most
interesting I ever attended’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 44), not only for his clarity and
enthusiasm in pure mathematics, but also for the amusing anecdotes he used
to tell during his lectures. Other lecturers were Professors A. Cayley, J. C. Adams
and G. G. Stokes. The first was significant for the particular way he had of
solving problems: ‘he did not seem to trouble much about choosing the best
method, but took the first that came to his mind. This led to analytical expres-
sions which seemed hopelessly complicated and uncouth’ but after a while,
‘in a few lines [he] had changed the shapeless mass of symbols into beautifully
symmetrical expressions, and the problem was solved’ (p. 47). Thomson saw
this as a good lesson not to be afraid of complicated mathematical expressions.
By contrast, Adams’ lectures were magnificently clear and ordered, since he
‘carried the feelings of an artist into his mathematics, and a demonstration had
 1.7 Second wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos 27

to be elegant as well as sound before he was satisfied’ (p. 47). His only problem
was that he read his lectures, which made them less appealing. Finally, Stokes’
lectures were Thomson’s favourites: ‘for clearness of exposition, beauty and
aptness of the experiments, I have never heard their equal’ (p. 48).
The world of the Treatise was a world of ether. In the book, ‘an attempt [was]
made to explain electromagnetic phenomena by means of mechanical action
transmitted from one body to another by means of a medium occupying the
space between them’ (Maxwell, 1873, 2, §781). The existence of the ether was
technically only a hypothesis, but one that could be supported by different
and independent theories. Light and electromagnetism, previously independ-
ent phenomena, were united under the same explanatory framework. Light
was, in Maxwell’s theories, a manifestation of electromagnetic waves. This uni-
fication was a boost for the existence of an ether that had first been postu-
lated to account for the transmission of light. In Maxwell’s words, ‘if the study
of two different branches of science has independently suggested the idea of
a medium … the evidence for the physical existence of the medium will be
considerably strengthened’ (§781). The fact that electrical and optical evidence
independently supported the hypothesis of an ether produced in Maxwell and
those around him a ‘conviction of the reality of the medium similar to that
which we obtain, in the case of other kinds of matter, from the combined evi-
dence of the senses’ (§781).
Electromagnetic phenomena could be explained by considering the dynam-
ical properties of the all-pervading ether, i.e., assuming the ether to be a con-
tinuous medium in which kinetic and potential energy could be stored. The
transmission of this energy through the ether, consistent with the principle
of conservation of energy, would account for all the electromagnetic proc-
esses. Even though Maxwell had, for certain purposes, a particular model for
the structure of the ether, imagining it in terms of hexagonal cog-wheels in
motion, this structure was not important to account for the electromagnetic
phenomena. The only properties he needed the ether to have were those of a
continuous medium (Buchwald, 1988). The equations valid in hydrodynamics
would, then, be valid in describing the ether, in the same way that one does not
need to assume liquids are composed of atoms in order to discuss the hydro-
dynamic properties of fluids.
The last sentence of the two-volume opus makes it clear that his primary
goal in the Treatise was to understand the mechanisms by which the ether acts:
‘if we admit this medium as an hypothesis, I think it ought to occupy a prom-
inent place in our investigations, and that we ought to endeavour to construct
a mental representation of all the details of its action, and this has been my
constant aim in this treatise’ (Maxwell, 1873, §866). Thomson’s education was,
28 The early years in Manchester and Cambridge

as any Mathematical Tripos student in the 1870s, deeply imbued by this meta-
physical world-view.
Overall, the education in physics received in the Mathematical Tripos
was fundamentally theoretical. In J. J.’s times, students for the Mathematical
Tripos were not expected to attend any demonstrations in the new Cavendish
Laboratory. In fact, there had been attempts to include questions in the exami-
nations the answer of which was only possible if one had some experimental
knowledge; but the repeated failure to engage students and coaches alike in
this project meant that such questions were systematically left unanswered by
all students. By the late 1870s, ‘it had become clear that mathematics students
could grasp the principles of, say, Wheatstone’s Bridge and its application
to practical electrical measurements without actually witnessing the instru-
ment in action’ (Warwick, 2003a, p. 315). That explains why, in his under-
graduate years, Thomson never entered the Cavendish or even met Maxwell.
Nevertheless, Thomson did not see this almost exclusively mathematical train-
ing as a handicap for his career as a physicist: ‘I have found this of great value
(c’est le premier pas qui coûte), and it is a much less formidable task for the physi-
cist, who finds that his researches require a knowledge of the highest parts of
some branch of pure mathematics, to get this if he has already broken the ice,
than if he has to start ab initio’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 39).
Finally, in January 1880, Thomson sat the Mathematical Tripos examina-
tions. The tension on examinations days was extreme. Even such a relaxed and
self-confident man as J. J. Thomson had those days deeply engraved in his mem-
ory, especially the insomnia he suffered during the last five days. ‘Insomnia’,
he recalled, ‘is even more unpleasant in Cambridge than in most other places,
for since several clocks chime each quarter of an hour you know exactly how
much sleep you have lost, and this makes you lose more’ (Thomson, 1936,
p. 63). In spite of this difficulty, Thomson performed very well and ended up
second wrangler, Joseph Larmor topping the list. The total number of people
awarded honours was 99.
 2

J. J. Thomson’s early work in

Cambridge: a continuous and
all-embracing physics

2.1 In Cambridge as a graduate

J. J. Thomson decided to stay in science, and in the years immediately

after his graduation, he worked intensely to complement his education in order
to secure a position in academia. An obvious choice for a high wrangler was to
try to stay at Trinity College with a fellowship, which he won in the summer
of 1880. Another option arose in 1881 in the form of a vacant professorship of
applied mathematics at his very own Owens College, but his application was
turned down in favour of Arthur Schuster, who was more experienced and
already teaching there. The fascinating thing about the period 1880–1884 is
not only the amount of work he did, both theoretical and experimental, but
also the scope of it: we find him developing a dynamical theory of physics and
chemistry for his Trinity College fellowship dissertation, and a dynamical the-
ory of matter with which he won the prestigious Adams Prize of 1882; we find
him in the Cavendish, first trying to acquire the experimental skills that were
deemed unnecessary for Mathematical Tripos students, and later undertaking
some of the basic experiments that Maxwell had devised in the Treatise; and
we also find him developing some basic theoretical work on electrodynamics.
All this work finally gained him a university lectureship in Cambridge in 1883
and Fellowship of the Royal Society in the spring of 1884, even before he was
appointed Professor of Experimental Philosophy and director of the Cavendish
Laboratory.
Competition for college fellowships in Cambridge was fierce, and candidates
were allowed to apply up to three times, in the first, second and third summers
after graduation. It was rather unusual to make use of the first attempt since,
besides sitting for an examination, candidates had to write an original piece of

29
30 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

research work and possibly compete with people in their second or third year
after graduation; but Thomson applied for it and, contrary to the expectations
of his college tutor, he was elected to a fellowship. In retrospect, J. J. explained
that the reason for his success was, partly, that his research topic had been
in his mind, only waiting to be formally developed, since his days at Owens
College with Balfour Stewart: the reduction of all forms of energy to manifesta-
tions of kinetic energy. Parts of this dissertation were later published in two
papers in the Philosophical Transactions (Thomson 1885a, 1887), and formed the
core of his first book, Applications of Dynamics to Physics and Chemistry (Thomson,
1888). This work linked his early ideas from Owens with the mathematical
methods that he had learnt in Cambridge. In the same way that Maxwell had
merged mechanical and electrical energies, Thomson thought it his task to
extend this methodology to its logical conclusion: to reduce all forms of energy
(potential, electromagnetic, chemical, thermal, and so forth) to kinetic energy
(Topper, 1971).
This first project shows a characteristic that I want to emphasize in this chap-
ter: Thomson had an all-embracing view of what he called the Physical Sciences,
a concept that included all branches of physics and some areas of chemistry. In
the preface to Applications of Dynamics to Physics and Chemistry, Thomson argued
that, since the issues in the book ‘relate to phenomena which belong to the
borderland between two departments of Physics [meaning physics and chem-
istry], and which are generally either entirely neglected or but briefly noticed
in treatises upon either, I have thought that it might be of service to students
of Physics to publish them in a more complete form’ (Thomson, 1888, preface).
The first few chapters of this book introduced the reader to the mathemat-
ical methods of Lagrange and Hamilton as presented both by Maxwell and by
Routh, which enable the mathematical physicist to deal with physical phenom-
ena without knowing the intrinsic properties of the system or the nature of the
mechanism to be investigated. The phenomena to which these methods were
applied in the following chapters of the book included temperature, electro-
motive forces, elasticity, evaporation, absorption of gases by liquids, surface
tension of solutions, chemical dissociation, chemical equilibrium and the con-
nection between chemical change and electromotive forces.
Thomson heavily relied on the power of the mathematical methods that he
had learnt in the Mathematical Tripos, which he thought were also valid to
explain many chemical phenomena. To give just a few examples, when talk-
ing about chemical dissociation, Thomson claimed that ‘this phenomenon has
some analogy with that of evaporation’, since one could imagine that in the
same way there is an equilibrium between liquid and gas that allows for con-
densation and evaporation between the two states of matter, ‘so in dissociation,
 2.2 Early experimental work at the Cavendish 31

we have also equilibrium between portions of the same substance in two dif-
ferent conditions’, even though, in this case, both would be in the gaseous
state: ‘the molecules in the one condition being more complex than those in
the other, and matter being able to pass from one condition into the other by
the more complex molecules splitting up, “dissociating” as it is called into the
simpler ones, while on the other hand some of the simpler ones combine and
form the more complex molecules’ (Thomson, 1888, p. 193). In a later chapter
on electrolysis, the continuity between physics and chemistry is again made
clear: ‘the principle that when a system is in equilibrium the Hamiltonian
function is stationary can be applied to determine the connexion between the
electromotive force of a battery and the nature of the chemical combination
which takes place when an electric current flows through it’ (p. 265). Thus,
Thomson’s work tried, from the very beginning, to extend the dominions of
his physics into the realms of chemistry. He not only thought that chemical
processes were partly explained by physico-dynamical processes, but also that
the tools to study chemical processes were the mathematical methods he had
learnt in the Mathematical Tripos.
It has been said that this 1888 book ‘made [Thomson] one of the founders
of the new science of theoretical physical chemistry. If he had continued in it,
he might have become as distinguished in physical chemistry as he became
in physics’ (Crowther, 1974, p. 107). Thomson’s all-embracing programme
was, however, rather different to the early discipline of physical chemistry.
According to most historians of science, physical chemistry was the outcome
of chemists interested in the physical foundations of chemical phenomena.
The fathers of physical chemistry, the Swede Svante Arrhenius, the German
Wilhelm Ostwald, and the Dutch J. H. van’t Hoff, were chemists – mainly
organic chemists – willing to develop a new discipline (Servos, 1990; Nye, 1993).
Thomson, on the other hand, was mainly a physicist trying to extend the meth-
ods of physics into the chemical dominions, in a more all-embracing way. That
may explain why Thomson was not in contact with the new physical chemists
until well into the twentieth century, after Thomson’s corpuscle became the
electron of the physical chemists (Nye, 2001).

2.2 Early experimental work at the Cavendish

Although not completely ignorant of experimental matters, thanks to

his time at Owens College, during the two and a half years of the Mathematics
Tripos he visited the Cavendish only occasionally to see his Mancunian friends
John H. Poynting and Schuster. Had he then spent more time there, he would
have met Maxwell, the first director of the Cavendish, who died prematurely
32 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

in 1879. The laboratory was under the direction of Lord Rayleigh at the time
of Thomson’s first reencounter with an experimental laboratory in 1881, a
reencounter that was not totally promising. After a first unsuccessful attempt
‘to detect the existence of some effects which I thought would follow from
Maxwell’s theory that changes in electric forces in a dielectric produced mag-
netic forces’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 97), Rayleigh suggested that Thomson should
start with easier, more standard, experiments that would allow him to acquire
a close familiarity with basic experimental techniques in electromagnetism. In
a few months, however, he had gained enough experience to publish his results
in his first Cavendish paper in the Philosophical Magazine (Thomson, 1881b).
These experiments confirmed that ‘a coil acts in many cases like a conden-
ser, and possesses appreciable electrostatic capacity’, something that had been
incidentally mentioned by Helmholtz and others, and about which ‘I am not
aware, however, of any experiments in which this property produced any very
marked effect’ (Thomson, 1881b, p. 49). Thomson’s aim was, basically, not so
much to prove this effect, but to measure its intensity. From a practical point
of view, the experimental set-up was nothing new, but closely relied on some
electromagnetic experiments that Lord Rayleigh had done ten years earlier:
two wires were wound side by side on a bobbin, one being the primary and
the other the secondary circuit on which the current was induced. The goal of
the experiment was to measure the condenser capacity of the secondary coil
by trying to find induced currents in it when the current in the primary coil
was broken. In order to do so, this second coil was cut into sections that were
linked by small spirals through which the expected induced current passed.
A small magnetized needle inside this spirals measured the intensity of such
induced currents and, indirectly, the condenser capacity of the coil. This work
was relatively simple and straightforward, but helped Thomson familiarize
himself with the Cavendish regime of experimental work in electromagnetism
that had been initiated by Maxwell and which Lord Rayleigh was continuing.
I shall comment on this tradition later in this chapter.
His next experimental work, also suggested by Lord Rayleigh, was published
two years later, in 1883, time by which he had been able to move towards
more complicated experiments. One of the most dramatic consequences of
Maxwell’s work was the suggestion that light was an electromagnetic disturb-
ance propagated in the same medium through which other electromagnetic
actions are transmitted. This relationship between electromagnetism and light
would eventually be explicitly observed in the 1888 experiments of Heinrich
Hertz. At the time of writing the Treatise, Maxwell thought that this relation-
ship could be inferred from the value for the speed of light in air V, and also
by measuring ‘v’, the ratio between the electrostatic and electromagnetic units
 2.3 The origins of the electromagnetic theory of matter 33

of electric charge, which had dimensions of a speed, and which physically

accounted for the speed of the transmission of electromagnetic waves. Since
the ways to obtain both values were totally independent, ‘the agreement or
disagreement of the values of V and of v furnishes a test of the electromagnetic
theory of light’ (Maxwell, 1873, §786). The Treatise also gave a number of pos-
sible experiments that would provide a value of v.
By 1880 there had been up to six attempts to measure v, all of which gave
results of the same order of magnitude as the speed of light. This latter value
was also only known in first approximation. Neither value could ‘be said to
be determined as yet with such a degree of accuracy as to enable us to assert
that the one is greater or less than the other. It is to be hoped that, by further
experiments, the relation between the magnitudes of the two quantities may
be more accurately determined’ (Maxwell, 1873, §787). And this was the fun-
damental task to which Thomson was about to contribute in his first serious
experimental paper (Thomson, 1883b). His work followed one of the methods
for determining v suggested by Maxwell: a modified Wheatstone bridge with a
condenser in one of its arms was used to measure simultaneously the capaci-
tance of the condenser (an electrostatic unit) and the resistance of the different
arms of the bridge (an electrodynamics unit). In his biography of Thomson, the
son of Lord Rayleigh pointed at two facts about these experiments worth men-
tioning. First, the then director of the Cavendish ‘had already designed some
of the apparatus to be used, and had contemplated taking part in the work
himself … but … Thomson rather ran away with it, a natural result of energy,
enthusiasm and self-reliance’. Second, Thomson seems to have been ‘over san-
guine’ in spite of his ‘rather limited experience in experiments’, overlooking
possible sources of error ‘without applying the test of using alternative meth-
ods’ (Rayleigh, 1942, p. 18). The result he obtained, 2.963 × 1010 cm per second,
was the closest to the speed of light known at that time (around 2.998×1010
cm per second), but it was later proved to have an accumulated error of 1%. In
1890, he repeated the experiments with G. F. C. Searle, identifying some of the
sources of error, and obtained a value of 2.995 × 1010 (Thomson & Searle, 1890).
As we shall see, by that time, J. J. had almost finished preparing the revised
third edition to Maxwell’s Treatise.

2.3 The origins of the electromagnetic theory of matter

Warwick described Thomson as one of the most prominent

Maxwellians of the ‘second generation’, by which he meant the group of
Cambridge graduates, including Thomson, Poynting, R. Glazebrook, and
J. Larmor, who received a systematic introduction to Maxwell’s work with
34 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

Routh as coach and W. D. Niven as lecturer. Thomson mastered the content,

the ethos and the limitations of the Treatise to such an extent that he could
‘fashion himself as the University’s leading expert on Maxwell’s theory’
(Warwick, 2003a, p. 334). The training in the Mathematical Tripos was such
that only a few months after graduating, and while preparing his dissertation
for the Trinity College fellowship, J. J. managed to publish a theoretical paper
in the Philosophical Magazine in which he went beyond the Treatise in describing
the behaviour of light as an electromagnetic wave.
The object of this paper was to generalize Maxwell’s equations of light ‘by
taking into account the motion of the medium through which light is passing’
(Thomson, 1880, p. 284), which could help validate Maxwell’s theory of light
with specific experimental results in different media. In particular, Thomson’s
generalized equations of light helped him to derive mathematical formulae
for the reflection and refraction of a ray of light at the surface of a transpar-
ent medium, as well as the change in speed for light in a moving medium. As
Warwick pointed out, ‘where Maxwell had attempted to develop a complicated
dynamical account of the interaction of electromagnetic waves with transpar-
ent media, Thomson assumed only that the rapidly oscillating electromagnetic
fields of a light ray were subject to the same boundary conditions at the sur-
face of a dielectric as were static electric and magnetic fields’ (Warwick, 2003a,
p. 337). The results Thomson obtained were in accordance with the ones given
by the optical theory of light. J. J. was here embodying the ethos of a Maxwellian
of the second generation: on the one hand, he was focusing on the central ques-
tion of the Treatise, i.e., the electromagnetic nature of light, as he had also done
in his first serious experimental work; on the other hand, he was addressing
the problem with the use of Lagrangians, and not with the use of some intricate
mechanism for the behaviour of the light ray, as Maxwell himself had unsuc-
cessfully tried in the 1860s. Furthermore, by applying the continuity of bound-
ary conditions to the case of rapidly oscillating fields, Thomson was basically
putting together two different sections from the Treatise. This was the ‘kind of
information that a member of the first generation [of Maxwellians] might have
passed on to a keen student like Thomson’.
More relevant for the history of electrodynamics was his paper ‘On the electric
and magnetic effects produced by the motion of electrified bodies’, published
in April 1881, and normally mentioned as the foundation stone of the so-called
electromagnetic theory of matter (Thomson, 1881a). Again, this paper aimed
at developing Maxwell’s Treatise further, but now the trigger was some recent
experiments on cathode rays by William Crookes and by Eugen Goldstein, who
at that time thought that these rays consisted of charged particles at high speed
(Darrigol, 2000, pp. 274–87). J. J.’s paper consisted of a mathematical analysis
 2.3 The origins of the electromagnetic theory of matter 35

of the behaviour of a charged particle in an electric and magnetic field. In par-

ticular, he studied three aspects: ‘the force existing between two moving elec-
trified bodies, what is the magnetic force produced by such a moving body, and
in what way the body is affected by a magnet’ (Thomson, 1881a, p. 229). The
particular way Thomson dealt with the mathematical formalism in this paper
is, yet again, a very good example of his training in the Mathematical Tripos
in the late 1870s: far from making new and complex mechanical suppositions,
Maxwell’s equations were treated as a given that had to be fulfilled.
The starting point for J. J. was the case of a charged sphere moving in a
medium of a certain inductive capacity. Following Maxwell, Thomson argued
that the moving charged sphere would induce a variation of the electric dis-
placement at every point of the medium. ‘Now, according to Maxwell’s theory’,
he wrote, ‘a variation in the electric displacement produces the same effect
as an electric current; and a field in which electric currents exist is a seat of
energy; hence the motion of the charged sphere has developed energy, and con-
sequently the charged sphere must experience a resistance as it moves through
the dielectric’ (Thomson, 1881a, p. 230). This resistance could be mathemat-
ically treated as an increase of mass of the moving particle. Thus, the mass of
the charged particle increases with its own movement, like any solid moving
in a perfect fluid. Following the analogy with a solid sphere moving in water,
‘when the sphere moves it sets the water around it in motion … This makes the
sphere behave as if its mass were increased by a mass equal to half the mass of
a sphere of water of the same volume as the sphere itself. This additional mass
is not in the sphere but in the space around it’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 93).
The idea that a moving charged particle generated an increase of mass due
to its own movement was picked up a decade later by his closest rival in the
Mathematical Tripos, Joseph Larmor, as well as others, both in England and on
the Continent, to develop a theory of matter in which the origin of all mass was
supposed to be of electromagnetic origin (Jammer; 1961, McCormmach; 1970,
Darrigol, 2000). As we shall see in Chapter 4, in the first years of the twenti-
eth century, J. J. Thomson himself would toy with the idea of electromagnetic
mass as the source for the mass of his corpuscle and, since he was hoping for
all matter to be composed only of corpuscles, for all mass whatsoever. The idea
was then short-lived; but in 1881, and in spite of this paper, Thomson had no
serious views on the possibility of a totally electromagnetic mass. As Jammer
remarked many years ago (Jammer, 1961, p. 137), the example Thomson picked
to illustrate the increase of mass in his 1881 paper shows how far he was from
seriously considering any sort of an electromagnetic theory of mass. ‘To form
some idea of what the increase of mass could amount to in the most favour-
able case’, he said, ‘let us suppose the earth electrified to the highest potential
36 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

possible without discharge, and calculate the consequent increase in mass’

(Thomson, 1881a, p. 234). The calculations for this ‘most favourable case’ gave
an increase of 650 tons for the earth, which is negligible compared to the
whole mass of the earth. This case was certainly the ‘most favourable’ because
this extra mass depended directly on the radius of the sphere, so the bigger
the sphere the greater the increase in mass. With this, Thomson implied that
the induced mass, although mathematically interesting, was actually irrelevant
for ordinary matter.
To finish with this paper, let us go back to Thomson’s motivation for it,
which was to shed some light on discussions about the nature of the phenom-
ena of discharge in vacuum tubes that Crookes and others had been study-
ing. In particular, Crookes had started a controversy with German scientists
about the nature of cathode rays, and whether this discharge phenomenon was
better explained by corpuscular or undulatory theories. Furthermore, Arthur
Schuster had been working at the Cavendish on discharge-tubes related phe-
nomena, on which he would become an expert in Owens College. As we shall
see, cathode rays would eventually become associated with Thomson’s scien-
tific career.In 1881, however, they were only one of many areas in which the
ideas from the Treatise could be tried. Sparking from his study on the behav-
iour of electrified moving bodies, Thomson suggested a mechanism to explain
one aspect of the discharge of cathode rays, i.e., ‘the green phosphorescence
observed in vacuum-tubes at places where the molecular streams strike the
glass’ (Thomson, 1881a, p. 237). He assumed that the collision of an electrified
molecule on the glass of the tube would involve a reversal of the velocity of this
charged body, therefore a very large variation in the vector potential generated
by it and, as a consequence, the glass would be subjected to a rapidly varying
electromagnetic force. But this, ‘if Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of light
be true, is exactly what it is subjected to when a beam of light falls upon it,
which we know is the ordinary method of exciting phosphorescence’. This last
statement again illustrates something we have already found: Thomson’s early
work after graduation was typical of a Cambridge Maxwellian of the second
generation in that, while taking the Treatise as the basic electromagnetic the-
ory to be developed, he was also aware of its basic limitation, i.e., the need for
a clear confirmatory experimental proof of the relationship between light and
electromagnetic fields.

2.4 The vortex ring theory of the atom

Perhaps the most revealing work of Thomson in this early period is his
essay ‘On vortex rings’ (Thomson, 1883a), with which he won the prestigious
 2.4 The vortex ring theory of the atom 37

Adams Prize in 1882, a prize that had been established in 1848 to commem-
orate the discovery of Neptune by John Couch Adams, and which was, at the
time, open to Cambridge graduates only. The subject for that year was ‘an
investigation of the action of two vortex rings on each other’, a topic that
was typical of the Cambridge of the day and fashionable among many British
mathematicians and physicists (Kragh, 2002). The question of vortex rings had
been a topic of interest since 1867, when William Thomson had suggested an
atomic model in which atoms could be thought of as vortex rings in the ether.
Besides its unifying character, this theory of a plenum was interesting since it
maintained the immutability of primordial atoms. Helmholtz had shown that
vortex filaments in a perfect fluid would not dissipate or be destroyed. Since
the ether was mainly understood as a fluid, these results served to account for
the indestructibility of atoms, and, at the same time, to treat them as special
manifestations of the ether. This conception had considerable impact among
scientists, and in the 1870s and 1880s, ‘British physicists became increasingly
attracted to this simple picture of atomic matter involving a concentration
of ether spinning like a smoke ring in air’ (Topper, 1980, 41; see also Klein,
1973).
William Thomson, as the father of the vortex atom model, felt that the the-
ory was consistent with two of his key philosophical prejudices: his enthusi-
asm for dynamical models and his profound dislike for atomism, understood
as Lucretius or Newton did, i.e. ‘the monstrous assumption of infinitely strong
and infinitely rigid pieces of matter’ (W. Thomson, 1867, p. 15). This model
gave him, for some time, the possibility of explaining those atoms in terms of
a more fundamental continuous fluid. W. Thomson disliked the atomic theory
because he felt that ‘Lucretius’ atom does not explain any of the properties
of matter without attributing them to the atom itself. … Every … property of
matter has … required an assumption of specific forces pertaining to the atom,
(pp. 15–16). In other words, W. Thomson felt that the nature of matter was not
fully explained by atomic theories: atoms could explain the organization and
some of the properties of bodies, but neglected the explanation of what matter
actually is. In the years up to 1880, W. Thomson worked at this hypothesis
and tried to explain with it many physical phenomena, including gravitation,
the kinetic theory of gases, the dissipation of energy, and the wave motion in
solids and liquids (Smith & Wise, 1989). Although, by 1882, W. Thomson and
P. G. Tait had given up this cosmological idea, the topic remained of interest
to mathematicians. This explains why most of the papers on vortex theory
were published in journals of mathematics, not physics journals, since it was
regarded as a most interesting mathematical problem; not only hydrodynamics
was involved, but also the new area of topology of knots (Kragh, 2002, p. 46).
38 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

In this milieu, the 1882 Adams Prize essay was intended mainly as an exer-
cise with a purely mathematical interest. But J. J. Thomson managed to broaden
the question once again and to turn the problem of the stability of two vor-
tex rings into an all-embracing theory of matter, thus reviving the theory of
vortex atoms as a true theory of matter. In his words, an atomic theory based
on the behaviour of vortex rings ‘has á priori very strong recommendations in
its favour’. And he used the following analogy between vortex rings and the
atomic theory:

For the vortex ring obviously possesses many of the qualities which
a molecule that is to form the basis of a dynamical theory of gases
must possess. It is indestructible and indivisible; the strength of the
vortex ring and the volume of liquid composing it remain for ever
unaltered; and if any vortex ring be knotted, or if two vortex rings be
linked together in any way, they will retain for ever the same kind of
be-knottedness or linking. These properties seem to furnish us with
good materials for explaining the durable qualities of the molecule
(Thomson, 1883a, §1).

Moreover, many other properties of the molecules, either independently or in

relation to other molecules, could be accounted for using this model. The theory
could explain atoms as secondary structures of a primary entity, the ether, and
so it could be regarded as a more fundamental explanation of matter, since
‘it proposes to explain by means of the laws of Hydrodynamics all the proper-
ties of bodies as consequences of the motion of this fluid. It is thus evidently
of a very much more fundamental character than any theory hitherto stated’
(Thomson, 1883a, §1). The argument of simplicity was a very powerful one;
the only fundamental entity of nature would be the all-present fluid and every-
thing could be represented by the energy at every point. Many years later, in his
autobiography, Thomson looked back to this theory with some nostalgia to say
that ‘there was a spartan simplicity about it. The material of the universe was
an incompressible perfect fluid and all the properties of matter were due to the
motion of this fluid’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 94).
Thomson’s essay ‘On vortex rings’, besides being a typical example of
Cambridge mathematical work with its over 50 pages of Lagrangians and
differential equations, reveals in its last section that all these calcula-
tions ‘would enable us to work out a complete dynamical theory of gases’
(Thomson, 1883a, §51), by which he meant both the physical and chemical
properties of material substances. In fact, this was not his first encounter
with vortex rings. While he was at Owens he had shared laboratory hours
with Stewart at the time of the latter’s writing of The Unseen Universe (Stewart
 2.4 The vortex ring theory of the atom 39

& Tait, 1875). Also at Owens, Reynolds was physically experimenting with
vortex rings, and these images must have impressed a young J. J. Thomson
(Falconer, 1985, p. 17). In the essay, he also studied the possibility of perman-
ent combinations of elementary vortex rings, and concluded that there could
be stable combinations in systems consisting of up to six such rings. This was
in agreement with the possible valencies of most elements, and he was led
to speculate as follows:

The atoms of the different chemical elements are made up of vortex

rings all of the same strength, but some of these elements consist of
only one of these rings, others of two of the rings linked together,
others of three, and so on; thus, in this case, each vortex ring in the
atom would correspond to a unit of affinity in the chemical theory of
quantivalence (Thomson, 1883a, §54; see Sinclair, 1987, p. 95).

In this model, the mass of the atoms is no longer their fundamental character-
istic, and their chemical affinity assumes such a role, bringing fundamental
chemical properties into the picture, which shows us again, from a different
angle, that J. J. was very much interested in chemical combinations of elements
and substances as he saw this as an approach to the better understanding of the
constitution of matter.
Thomson managed to bring the study of vortex rings further into the realm
of ultimate explanations of physical phenomena, so much so that, some months
after he wrote the essay, he applied some of its results in an attempt to explain
the conduction of electricity in gases (Thomson, 1883c). Furthermore, the essay
‘On vortex rings’ is also revealing about the way in which Thomson approached
chemistry: he was trying to explain chemical processes in terms of dynam-
ical physics, thus abandoning the idea of affinities as some sort of force that
was different from mechanical forces. The fact that Thomson was trying to
incorporate some aspects of chemistry into physics was also evident to those
who read the essay in Cambridge. For example, G. H. Darwin, the Professor of
Astronomy, congratulated Thomson on winning the Adams Prize in the follow-
ing terms: ‘The problems you have solved are of amazing difficulty, and the
results of the greatest interest. May you go on and discover a true dynamical
theory of chemistry’ (Darwin to Thomson, 25 January 1883, CUL, Add. 7654,
D4). Nevertheless this aim was not exclusive to Thomson, and indeed, in 1885,
G. F. FitzGerald corresponded with Thomson while trying to develop a model
of the electromagnetic ether, saying: ‘I thought it possible that electrical forces
might be explained by these general effects of vortices &c. and that chemical forces
might be due partly to these and partly to actions produced by the distortions
of the vortices’ (Figure 2.1). And he added: ‘For though chemical and electrical
40 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

Figure 2.1 At the time he was seriously considering his vortex ring theory as an
all-embracing theory of matter, Thomson also studied the properties of actual rings
in a fluid (Thomson & Newall, 1885, p. 429). Courtesy: The Royal Society.

forces are due to like causes nevertheless chemical action is of a much higher
order of complexity than simpler electrical actions (FitzGerald to Thomson,
1 January 1885, CUL, Add. 7654, F15). From his very early years as a researcher,
Thomson proved that he had a deep interest in formulating a dynamical theory
 2.5 Director of the Cavendish Laboratory 41

of chemistry, which would incorporate chemistry within the deductive physical

sciences; and his work was seen in this way by many of his peers.
In his study of the vortex atom theory in Victorian science, historian Helge
Kragh gave it a very definite lifetime: from 1867, the year of W. Thomson’s
suggestion, to 1898, when William Hicks, a professor in Sheffield, gave up the
project. J. J. Thomson worked on it until 1891, when he moved to his theory
of Faraday tubes. The new theory, which we shall encounter in the next chap-
ter, was less cosmological, for its principal goal was to explain the interaction
between electricity and matter, the key idea of his long research project study-
ing the discharge in tubes. Eventually, that new theoretical framework led him
to the discovery of the corpuscle. Faraday tubes, nonetheless kept one of the
main features of the vortex atom theory, i.e., the assumption that the funda-
mental entity in nature is the ether and that atoms (and, later, corpuscles), are
an epiphenomenon of the ether.

2.5 Director of the Cavendish Laboratory

In 1874, the Cavendish Laboratory was inaugurated at the New

Museums Site, a piece of land that had previously hosted the Cambridge’s
Botanic Garden. Its main purpose was to serve as a teaching laboratory for
the study of heat, electricity, and magnetism. These three subjects had been
introduced into the Mathematical Tripos in 1868 and, as a result of this deci-
sion, the new laboratory of physics and a new chair of experimental physics
were created. The first Professor of Experimental Physics was James Clerk
Maxwell, who was capable of both highly sophisticated theoretical work and
first-class experimental research. These two qualities were essential for the
first Cavendish Professor in Cambridge, since they satisfied both traditionalist
Cambridge dons, who thought that physics was necessarily mathematical, and
also the reformers, who believed in a closer connection between the university
and the practical, industrial and technological needs of the nation (Schaffer,
1992; Warwick, 2003a, pp. 264–72). The main role of the Cavendish was to
serve as a laboratory devoted to teaching purposes. As was usually the case in
Cambridge, in the early and mid-Victorian period, research was a professor’s
private activity. In fact, among the leading universities Cambridge was rela-
tively late in incorporating a physics laboratory, so much so that the Cavendish
was not part of the first generation of institutions in the so-called ‘laboratory
revolution’ in Britain (Gooday, 1990; see also Larsen, 1962; G. P. Thomson, 1964;
Crowther, 1974; Kim 2002).
In 1884, the chair of experimental physics in Cambridge was vacant. Lord
Rayleigh had accepted the professorship after Maxwell’s untimely death in
42 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

1879 but, after serving for over four years, he resigned, and the university had
to start the search for a new professor. The candidates for the chair were Arthur
Schuster (Manchester), Osborne Reynolds (Manchester), Richard T. Glazebrook
(demonstrator at the Cavendish with Rayleigh), Joseph Larmor (first wrangler
in 1880, now in Galway) and J. J. Thomson (Trinity College, Cambridge). The
powerful Trinity College was eager to dominate the election, in spite of the
fact that Rayleigh’s favourite was Glazebrook, who had been at the Cavendish
since 1876, and had thus worked with both Maxwell and Rayleigh. But pre-
cisely because of that, it is quite likely that some of the electors wanted a com-
plete change at the Cavendish, for Maxwell and Rayleigh had connected it too
closely to the electrical industry, a characteristic which was not appealing to
the Cambridge establishment (Schaffer, 1992).
There has been much speculation about the reasons why the relatively inex-
perienced J. J. Thomson was appointed to the chair of experimental physics.
Thomson said that his election as Lord Rayleigh’s successor was a complete sur-
prise to himself as well as to others (Thomson, 1936, p. 98). To take one example,
when Schuster complained that a junior person had been appointed, his mentor
in Manchester, Roscoe, tried to calm him down by pointing at the secrecy of any
election in Cambridge: ‘I do not at all agree with you that any slight is thrown
upon the work of the Senior Candidates by the choice of a junior. The election
is a very complicated function … [and] the Electors swore a dreadful oath not to
reveal anything whatever about his election’ (Roscoe to Schuster, 25 December
1884, RSA, AS/B/163). However, it was not very unusual to appoint brilliant
young students to professorships in Cambridge and the influence of Trinity
College was strong enough to make the appointment of a Trinity man quite
foreseeable. ‘Well, no one can say that the appointment is a bad one. Only … it
might perhaps have been a better one’, Roscoe said to the two Manchester con-
testants, Schuster and Reynolds, the day after the election (Roscoe to Schuster,
23, December 1884, RSA, AS/B/162). After his election, the vice-chancellor of the
university, Norman MacLeod Ferrers, made the following statement: ‘Professor
J. J. Thomson combines a great amount of mathematical knowledge and power
with, as I am assured, an experimental skill which promises to make him in
the long tenure of office to which I trust he may look forward a worthy succes-
sor of the two distinguished men by whom the Cavendish Professorship has
been occupied’ (CUR, xv, 1885, p. 324). It is interesting that Ferrers regarded
the experimental skills of J. J. Thomson as promising, as something that could be
improved in the near future. It seems that the short time he had spent at the
Cavendish between 1881 and 1884 was sufficient proof of his ability to become a
good experimentalist, which, together with his mathematical skills, made him
a promising replacement for Maxwell (Warwick, 2003a, p. 343).
 2.5 Director of the Cavendish Laboratory 43

A few of the first steps that Thomson took after his appointment are quite
significant, for they also showed that he thought some aspects of chemistry
relevant to the work of a laboratory of experimental physics. Glazebrook and
William Napier Shaw, demonstrators at the Cavendish under Rayleigh, stayed
in the laboratory. This was essential, to keep a certain continuity in the insti-
tution, especially in terms of teaching obligations, but they did not collaborate
with Thomson in their research. A few months after his election, Thomson
appointed Richard Threlfall, who had recently graduated in the Natural Science
Tripos and had later spent some time in Rudolf Fittig’s chemical laboratory
in Strasbourg, as a demonstrator in physics. With him, he started a series of
experiments on the chemical composition of gases. The first paper that they
published was ‘Some experiments on the production of ozone’, which is
clearly a chemical topic, and it was followed by a series of similar joint papers
(Thomson & Threlfall, 1886). That these experiments can be classified as chem-
ical is not an anachronism, for Thomson himself spoke of them in such terms:
‘I am at present’, he wrote to Schuster in early 1885, ‘experimenting on a chem-
ical thing, viz. the proportion of ozone formed at different pressures. I worked
out the thing theoretically and am now trying whether the theory is right or
not’ (Thomson to Schuster, 1 March 1885, RSA, AS/C/331).
Threlfall’s collaboration helps us to illustrate two aspects of Thomson’s
early days in his chair. On the one hand, he was clearly lacking in experimen-
tal skills and needed the help of people with more experience in the labora-
tory; on the other hand, he was determined to make the Cavendish a centre
for all the physical sciences, chemistry included, thus abandoning the almost
exclusively electromagnetic orientation which the Cavendish had had in the
previous decade, which had turned the laboratory into what Simon Schaffer
called a ‘manufactory of Ohms’ (Schaffer, 1992). In this respect, it is not wholly
justifiable to assert that Thomson’s lack of a research interest was the reason
a wide range of apparently disconnected research projects were carried out
at the Cavendish in the 1880s and early 1890s (Kim, 2002). If Thomson’s idea
of physics was all-embracing and included traditionally chemical topics, then
all these researches had their place in the Cavendish. Threlfall was mainly
an experimental chemist, and when he left for Australia in 1886, Thomson’s
experiments ran into trouble for lack of experimental know-how. He therefore
often turned to people from the Chemistry Department for advice (Sinclair,
1987, p. 97). His letters to Threlfall speak about the advice he received from
the Professor of Chemistry, George Liveing,1 and some of his published papers

1
Thomson to Threlfall, 7 Aug. 1886, CUL, Add. 7654, T19: ‘Then, on Liveing’s recommen-
dation I tried acid but this nearly all disappeared when the tube was heated’.
44 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

acknowledge the help of the praelector in chemistry at Gonville and Caius

College, Matthew M. Pattison Muir.

2.6 Third edition of Maxwell’s Treatise

Thomson’s own experimental work transcended the traditional bound-

aries between physics and chemistry. Shortly after his election in 1884, Thomson
started a long-term project on the study of electrical discharges in tubes filled
with gases. In the Treatise, Maxwell had said that ‘these, and many other phe-
nomena of electrical discharge, are exceedingly important, and when they are
better understood they will probably throw great light on the nature of electri-
city as well as on the nature of gases and the pervading space. At present, how-
ever, they must be considered as outside the domain of the mathematical theory
of electricity’ (Maxwell, 1873, third edition (1891), p. 63). Thomson agreed that
the study of discharge in gases promised to give insight into the nature of elec-
tricity (a physical problem) and the composition of matter (a chemical issue);
but he thought that the time had now come to try to give a dynamical account
of these phenomena. Dealing with discharge in tubes meant not only dealing
with electricity, but also working with different gases, the preparation of which
was clearly a task for chemists. Following the early theories of Crookes and
Schuster, electrolysis was the model that he used to account for the phenom-
ena that he observed in the discharge tubes, emphasising that molecules in the
gas split to make the transfer of charge possible. The importance given to elec-
trolysis can also be traced back to another suggestion of Maxwell in his Treatise,
where he stated that ‘of all electrical phenomena electrolysis appears the most
likely to furnish us with a real insight into the true nature of the electric cur-
rent, because we find currents of ordinary matter and currents of electricity
forming essential parts of the same phenomenon’ (Maxwell, 1873, third edition
(1891), p. 58). Thus, Thomson’s actual research project in the 1880s shows that
he thought that the time had come for chemistry to be given the status of a
grown-up science and thus to become a full member of the physical sciences.
He believed that it was time for scientists to develop physical – dynamical –
theories to account for the chemical problems of electrolysis, gas tubes, the
constitution of matter, and the composition of gases.
Maxwell, the first Cavendish Professor, also had his own views on the bound-
aries between physics and chemistry. Whereas Whewell had made it clear that
chemistry was not yet a proper physical science, Maxwell admitted that some
areas of chemistry could be regarded as physics. In his classification, ‘What is
commonly called Physical Science occupies a position intermediate between
the abstract sciences of arithmetic algebra and geometry and the morphological
 2.6 Third edition of Maxwell’s Treatise 45

and biological sciences’, where the morphological sciences ‘are rich in facts,
and will be well occupied for ages to come in the coordination of these facts’
(Maxwell, in Harman, 1995, p. 777).
The case of chemistry was, for Maxwell, rather odd. Being a physical sci-
ence, chemistry incorporated dynamical explanations but was expanding so
fast that the theorists could not keep up with new developments. In his words,
‘though [physical] Dynamical Science is continually reclaiming large tracts of
good ground from the one side of Chemistry, Chemistry is extending with still
greater rapidity on the other side, into regions where the dynamics of the pre-
sent day must put her hand upon her mouth’. And he goes on saying that,
however, ‘Chemistry is a Physical Science, and that of very high rank. I do not,
however, pretend to be able to go over its possessions and to show strangers the
boundaries’ (Maxwell, in Harman, 1995, p. 782).
Here, I emphasize the link between Thomson’s and Maxwell’s ideas because,
at this point, J. J. was not only a prominent member of the second generation of
Maxwellians but, in a way, he shaped himself as the natural continuator of the
great physicist’s, his successor in the chair of experimental physics, and the one
who would bring Maxwell’s project to its ultimate fulfilment. That partly explains
his constant reference to the Treatise in most of the projects he undertook. This
also gives us the context of one of his early tasks as director of the Cavendish: to
prepare a third edition of the Treatise. A second edition of the complicated two-
volume opus had been published in 1881. Maxwell himself had begun the task of
correcting, changing and clarifying many aspects of the Treatise. At the time of his
death, he had only had the chance to revise, correct and, at times, totally rewrite
the first nine chapters. The rest remained unchanged except for some correc-
tions of obvious mistakes by W. D. Niven, with the help of his brother Charles
and J. J. Thomson. By the end of the 1880s, a new edition that incorporated clari-
fications and the latest developments in electromagnetism was needed, and J. J.
agreed to take on this task. In the preface to this third edition of 1891, Thomson
explained his original idea for this undertaking:

When I began to revise this Edition it was my intention to give in

foot-notes some account of the advances made since the publication
of the first edition, not only because I thought it might be of service
to the students of Electricity, but also because all recent investigations
have tended to confirm in the most remarkable way the views
advanced by Maxwell. I soon found, however, that the progress made
in the science had been so great that it was impossible to carry out
this intention without disfiguring the book by a disproportionate
quantity of foot-notes (Thomson, in Maxwell, 1891, preface).
46 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

The solution he chose was to leave the Treatise as it was and to ‘complement’
it with a whole new volume that included the latest developments in elec-
tromagnetism and which is referred to throughout the third edition as the
‘Supplementary Volume’. We will discuss this volume at the beginning of the
next chapter. Now, let us go back to the institutional tour de force that Thomson
undertook with the other scientific departments in Cambridge at the begin-
ning of his tenure.

2.7 Mapping the domains of the physical sciences

From an institutional point of view, physics and chemistry were two

quite separate worlds in Cambridge in the 1870s. Physics was mainly part of
the Mathematical Tripos and chemistry was one of the central disciplines in
the Natural Science Tripos. This state of affairs was not unique. According to
John W. Servos (1990), by the middle of the century, chemists and physicists in
many of the leading European universities worked in different institutes, used
different instruments, and measured different properties. They even spoke dif-
ferent languages, since, whereas the chemist needed only arithmetic to express
weight relations, the student of physics was becoming ever more dependent
upon higher mathematics. Looking at the institutional development of the
departments of physics, chemistry and, later, engineering, it could be said that
Cambridge was just one particular case of this general description. However,
looking at the work and the interests of some of the people who were influ-
ential in the university, one can argue that the process of specialization took
place alongside a parallel – but unsuccessful – effort to unify the sciences, with
mathematical physics as the exemplary science. As we have seen, this was the
view of J. J. Thomson, but it was also that of the Professor of Chemistry, George
Downing Liveing.
Liveing was the Professor of Chemistry in Cambridge from 1861. His edu-
cation made him capable of teaching the natural sciences in the Cantabrigian
style. He graduated as eleventh wrangler in 1850 and enrolled in the first ever
Natural Science Tripos course, after which he was awarded a lectureship at St
John’s College. The college soon realized the need for new facilities for teach-
ing demonstrations, as well as for independent research in chemistry, and,
therefore, a new laboratory was built. This laboratory became the first place
in Cambridge where practical experimental tuition was part of the training
of students (Dampier, 2004). There were also some meagre university facilities
assigned to the chair of chemistry: an office, which was to be shared with the
Professors of Botany and the Jacksonian Professor, and two small empty rooms.
These rooms and an extension to them provided a small chemistry laboratory
 2.7 Mapping the domains of the physical sciences 47

for the purpose of demonstration lectures and research; but the number of stu-
dents and the amount of research increased without any corresponding growth
in the facilities. This was the reason why Liveing preferred to use the laboratory
of St John’s for teaching purposes, in the first years of his tenure, while he kept
the university facilities for his own research (Haley, 2002).
Liveing is a relatively unknown figure in the history of science. The impact
of his work in Cambridge has more to do with the large amount of adminis-
trative work that he did than with his research. From his point of view, chem-
istry was the central experimental science and physics was the model towards
which chemistry had to be directed. To give an example, in 1874 he wrote in
the Student’s Guide to the University of Cambridge that ‘chemistry teaches
laws of nature which are universal, and which find their applications when-
ever the structure of natural objects is under consideration’. In his Presidential
Address to the chemistry section of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science in 1882, he claimed that chemistry was not only a descriptive sci-
ence but was about to become a predictive science based on mechanical prin-
ciples, as adult sciences were supposed to be from a Whewellian point of view
(Roberts, 1989, pp. 166–7). The most relevant advance in chemistry in recent
years, said Liveing, ‘was in the attempt to place the dynamics of chemistry on
a satisfactory basis, to render an account of the various phenomena of chem-
ical action on the same mechanical principles as are acknowledged to be true
in other branches of physics’. And he added that ‘I cannot say that chemis-
try can yet be reckoned amongst what are called the exact sciences …, but
that some noteworthy advances have in recent years been made, which seem
to bring such a solution of chemical problems more nearly within our reach’
(Liveing, 1883, p. 479). This optimistic statement was followed by a fragment of
the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, in which Whewell regretted that the chem-
ical attraction known as affinity had not been reduced to the mechanical laws
of attraction. Liveing thought that this moment was close at hand, especially if
chemists considered the principle of conservation of energy, which was admit-
ted both in physics and chemistry, as the cornerstone in the explanation of this
property. Later in this discourse, Liveing regretted that the basic training in
chemistry was still far from embodying this new approach:

We still find chemical combinations described as if they were

statical phenomena … We still find change of valency described as a
suppression of ‘bonds of affinity’… We still find saturated compounds
spoken of as if the stability of a compound were independent of
circumstances, and chemical combination no function of temperature
and pressure … They present something easily grasped by the infant
48 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

mind, and schoolmasters are fond of them, but only those who
have each year to combat a fresh crop of misconceptions, and false
mechanical notions engendered by them, can be aware how much
they hinder, I won’t say the advance, but the spread of real chemical
science (Liveing, 1883, p. 480).

The rhetoric of this extract, with its allusions to childish and adult science,
perhaps shows the influence of Whewell’s philosophy, but more significantly,
this report helps us to link his ideas to those of the young Thomson. Indeed,
Liveing recognized that the vortex theory was not one of those ‘false mech-
anical notions’ but that it provided a ‘standing ground’ for the fundamental
explanation of matter (Liveing, 1883, p. 481). It is significant that, at the time
when Liveing was preparing his speech, Thomson was working on the dynam-
ics of vortex rings, with which he tried to bring about an invasion of the field
of chemistry by the ‘adult’ science of physics.
In 1885, just one year after J. J. Thomson’s appointment, Liveing summarized
his speculations in his only book, Chemical Equilibrium, the Result of the Dissipation
of Energy, in which he set out his ideas in favour of basing chemical phenomena
on mechanical principles. In the preface to the book, he manifested an even
stronger support for the vortex theory of atoms on the grounds that it gave
‘more definite ideas of the manner in which dissipation of energy results in
equilibrium’, and because it helped the acceptance that chemical action could
be ‘founded on sound mechanical principles’ (Liveing, 1885, preface). This step
forward towards a foundation on ‘sound mechanical principles’ meant that
chemistry could not be satisfied with the concept of affinity, ‘whatever that
may mean’, but that it needed to consider chemical bonding as consisting ‘in a
harmony of the motions of the combined atoms in virtue of which they move
and vibrate together, and that such harmony is brought about by the general
force in nature which compels to an equal distribution of energy throughout
the universe’ (Liveing, 1885, p. 83).
Liveing further advocated the introduction of mechanical principles in
chemistry using the following analogy: ‘The view here advanced … of chemical
elements is that they need not differ in substance one from another but only
in the magnitude and the form of structure of their atoms’. And he gave the
following examples: ‘Hydrogen and oxygen may be compared to different bells
which though made of the same metal ring out different tones. The possibility
of the chemical combination of two atoms will depend on the possibility of
complete harmony of their motions’ (Liveing, 1885, p. 89). It is interesting to
note that Liveing is being fully consistent with Thomson’s views on the pre-
eminence of kinetic energy, which had been the core of his Trinity fellowship
 2.7 Mapping the domains of the physical sciences 49

dissertation and the central idea of his 1888 book Applications of Dynamics to
Physics and Chemistry. Even though there is no extant correspondence between
Liveing and Thomson, it is quite likely that they discussed such ideas in their
meetings in Cambridge.2 Nevertheless, in 1891, there were complaints that in
the Department of Chemistry ‘there is too much of the Physical Side and very
little Organic teaching’ (Dewar to Alexander, in Roberts, 1989, p. 171), a defect
that some thought had to be corrected. The symbiotic relationship that existed
between Liveing and Thomson was not exciting for everyone in Cambridge.
Pattison Muir, the incumbent chemist at Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge, is also relevant in this chapter. It is not surprising that he came
to Thomson’s aid with chemical and experimental advice after Threlfall left
Cambridge, since they knew each other very well, and Thomson may have
had particular confidence in him. Pattison Muir had been a demonstrator
and assistant lecturer Owens College, Manchester, from 1873 to 1877, while
Thomson was a student there. In his 1888 book, Thomson quoted profusely
from Pattison Muir’s book, a Treatise on the Principles of Chemistry (1884). The
latter is also a good example of the reductionist approach to chemistry of
some Cambridge scientists, which was consistent with Thomson’s mindset. In
close parallel to Liveing’s statements, Pattison Muir declared his enthusiasm
for the recent progress of chemistry: ‘of late many chemists have resumed the
investigation of the general conditions of chemical action, and have obtained
results which give good grounds for hoping that this study … will lead to the
establishment of chemistry as a branch of the science of dynamics’ (Pattison
Muir, 1884, pp. 3–4).
Neither Thomson, nor Liveing, nor Pattison Muir thought that chemistry
was about to disappear. A grown-up chemistry could be subsumed into a gen-
eral category of physical sciences, similar to what had happened with electri-
city and heat. Pattison Muir tried to set the boundaries between physics and
chemistry by saying that ‘Chemistry deals with those reactions between bodies
wherein profound modifications in the properties of the bodies occur’ and by
stating that ‘Chemistry furnishes problems for the solution of which physical
and dynamical methods are applicable. Chemical science is ever tending toward
abstract truths, i.e., truths involved in many phenomena although actually
seen in none’ (Patison Muir, 1884, p. 4). Thus, chemistry had its own methods
and aims, as far as empirical data were concerned; but, in terms of explana-
tions, physics was the model. Moreover, the approach of chemistry and physics
needed to take place from both sides. Not only did chemists need to approach

2
The correspondence between Thomson and Threlfall points to the natural exchange of
ideas and advice between Thomson and Liveing.
50 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

physics in search of explanations, but also physicists were expected to broaden

the scope of their explanatory methods to include the realm of chemical phe-
nomena. As an example, Pattison Muir talked about the molecular hypothesis
as ‘one of the lines along which dynamical science pursues its advance into the
sphere of chemistry. The study of chemical phenomena is also brought within
the pale of dynamical methods by the application to these phenomena of the
general principles of the conservation and degradation of energy’ (p. 5).
A third Cambridge chemist to bring into the picture is James Dewar. He
was Jacksonian Professor of Natural Experimental Philosophy, a chair that had
been created in 1783 and that had been held, at times, by people working in
engineering, as well as in other applied sciences such as medicine, metallurgy,
chemistry, and mechanics. Dewar was educated in Edinburgh and had his first
appointments there, but he was elected Jacksonian Professor in 1875. However,
he decided to make this position compatible with the Fullerian Professorship of
Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, to which he was appointed
two years later. This meant that he spent more time in London than in
Cambridge, since he had better facilities for his experiments there (Ross, 2004).
That Dewar was suitable for a position as a Professor of Experimental Science in
Cambridge can be inferred, among other factors, from the report that Maxwell
wrote about him in 1874 for a position at the University of Glasgow. It is likely
that, only one year later, Maxwell would have used similar arguments:

I consider it of great importance in the present state of science that

the Chairs of Chemistry in our universities should be filled by men
who are able not only to extend our knowledge of the combinations
of matter, but also to take part in working out the right views of
combination of bodies, and who must therefore possess a thorough
knowledge of physical as well as of chemical theories, and a mastery
of the most accurate methods of research. The researches of Mr.
Dewar in physical chemistry relate to properties of bodies which
are among the most fundamental of those lying within our present
range of observation, his methods of experimentation sound and well
devised, and the largeness of the field which he has already exploited
afford every reason to expect that he will continue to make important
contributions both to the extension of chemical science and to its
establishment on a firm physical basis (Maxwell, in RI, Box D/II/C/16).

Liveing and Dewar started a joint project on spectroscopic analysis on which

they published many papers from 1878 onwards. For that purpose, Liveing
bought a spectroscope, paid for at his own expense, since it was difficult to
obtain funds for scientific research from the university. Spectroscopy could,
 2.8 A new tripos in engineering 51

in retrospect, be considered as a step towards physical chemistry, since it

deals with the chemical composition of elements on the basis of their physical
behaviour, even though it has been argued that photochemistry did not play an
important role in the configuration of the new discipline of physical chemistry
at the turn of the century (Dolby, 1976).
While the facilities for experimental physics, i.e., the Cavendish Laboratory,
were very good, chemistry lacked a centralized laboratory for research of a
high standard. On the other hand, there was more of an experimental tradition
in the area of chemistry than there was in physics. The relationship between
the Cavendish and the chemistry laboratories can be thought of as one of
mutual help, in which neither was superior to the other. An example of this
is the assistance given to Thomson by Pattison Muir, who provided, not only
advice but also material help, such as the standardized solutions that Thomson
needed for his experiments on ozone. Another specific example is Thomson’s
collaboration with Ebenezer Everett, who became the Cavendish glass blower
in 1887, after training in the Chemistry Department. In fact, Liveing helped
personally in this move (Thomson to Threlfall, 20 March 1887 and 4 September
1887, CUL, Add. 7654, T16 and T20). The task of blowing glass was crucial for
the kind of experiments that Thomson was performing on the discharge of
gases in tubes, and Everett proved to be very successful at this job, as Thomson
always acknowledged.
In 1888 a new building for chemistry was built close to the Cavendish
Laboratory. The new facilities consolidated the institutionalization of chem-
istry in Cambridge, the recovery of its independence from the Cavendish, and
a shift towards research in more practical areas of chemistry. The superiority
of physics in terms of facilities disappeared and, with this, Thomson’s ideal
of having chemistry subordinated to physics was jeopardized, although not
totally abandoned. In 1894, he used a metaphor according to which physics,
chemistry, and engineering appeared to be working on a common project. In
his words, ‘the work of chemists and physicists may be compared to that of
two sets of engineers boring a tunnel from opposite ends – they have not yet
met, but they have got so near that they can hear the sounds of each other’s
advances’ (Thomson, 1894a, p. 493). This quotation brings us to a third element:
the role of engineering in shaping the structure of the university.

2.8 A new tripos for engineering

Thomson needed the help of experimental chemists in order to develop

his research as Cavendish Professor, and this necessity helped forge strong rela-
tionships between him and people from the Department of Chemistry. These
52 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

relationships were not, however, merely contingent, but were also a manifest-
ation of a common philosophical goal: to make use of the explanatory power
of physics to account for chemical phenomena. A final example of Thomson’s
efforts to make physics – or, perhaps better, dynamics – central in the physical
sciences is his efforts, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, to found a new tripos
that would emphasize even more this centrality of physics in the organization
of the sciences.
In the 1830s and 1840s, several British universities created chairs of engin-
eering to cater for the demand for engineers in an increasingly industrialized
country. King’s College London, was the first university to have a professor of
engineering, after which Glasgow, University College London, Trinity College,
Dublin, and Queen’s College, Belfast, followed suit. In Cambridge, discussions
on creating a School of Engineering started in 1845, but that project saw oppos-
ition from the most conservative dons of the university, for whom a School of
Engineering was tantamount to having a warehouse giving university degrees.
The little engineering one could find in the Cambridge syllabus was tradition-
ally taught under the name of mechanics by the Jacksonian Professor of Natural
Experimental Philosophy.
As we noted earlier, in 1875, a chemist, Dewar, was appointed to the
Jacksonian professorship and a new chair for mechanism and applied
mechanics was created. The new professor was to teach ‘(1) The Principles
of Mechanism, (2) The Theory of Structures, (3) The Theory of Machines, and
(4) The Steam Engine and other Prime Movers’ (Hilken, 1967, p. 30), topics in
which a Cambridge student could take a special examination. The new pro-
fessor was also expected to play a central role in the eventual creation of a
School of Engineering in the university, but such a school was proving elusive.
James Stuart, the first Professor of Mechanism, worked on two fronts in order
to consolidate his department. On the one hand, he was keen to obtain a phys-
ical space for engineering, for which the University provided an old wooden
hut next to the Cavendish; on the other hand, he was eager to establish a new
tripos, different from both theMathematical and Natural Science Triposes,
which would give students of mechanism a greater prestige than the current
‘special examination’.
The discussions leading to the first proposal for the tripos reveal that the
reasons Thomson and others were supporting Stewart had to do with the gap
between theoretical and experimental science in Cambridge. The two existing
triposes appeared to be so clearly disconnected that both Liveing and Thomson
thought it advisable to create a tripos with a broad content of both mathem-
atics and practical science. The proposal regretted ‘the want of mathematical
training in the great number of engineering students, and it was most desirable
 2.8 A new tripos in engineering 53

that the mathematical training should be considerably increased; at the same

time these men could not possibly devote three or even two years exclusively to
mathematics’. Actually, ‘the proposal was quite as much for students of Physics
as for engineering students. The students of Physics wanted a great deal of
Mathematics but a very different kind of Mathematics from that in Part I. of the
[Mathematical] Tripos’ (CUR, 1886, p. 405).
Later in the discussions, Thomson made it clear that the reason he was sup-
porting the new tripos was not so much for the sake of engineering but because
of the lack of mathematical content in the Natural Science Tripos. That is why
he agreed with the suggestion that ‘if the Mathematical Tripos could be altered
that would be the best arrangement’. But this would take too long and ‘the
need of mathematical training for these students was very urgent’ (CUR, 1886,
p. 407). What was happening was that, due to the difficulty and the apparent
uselessness of much of the mathematics that was taught in the Mathematical
Tripos, students in the Natural Science Tripos did not feel encouraged to attend
the Mathematical Tripos lectures.
Shaw, echoing Thomson’s interest, put it very clearly in the Senate House
when he said that ‘to those observing what students of physics, chemistry, and
engineering in the University actually learnt, it became at once obvious that
there was a good deal of ground common to all, and that the examination which
covered the common ground and included certain portions of Mathematics
would be extremely useful’ (CUR, 1887, p. 77). In his conversations with other
engineers, Thomson had also drawn the conclusion that ‘a knowledge of Physics
was absolutely necessary for a scientific training for engineers; indeed one of
the most successful Professors said that he thought it more necessary even
than practical engineering, for a student could get practical engineering after
he had left the University, but he would have no other opportunity of making
the simple physical experiments contemplated by the regulations’ (p. 75). This
helps us to understand why Thomson wanted physics to be the central discip-
line between the too theoretical Mathematical Tripos, and the too experimental
Natural Science Tripos in which physics played only a subsidiary role.
It is quite significant that the final proposal for a Tripos for Mechanics,
Physics and Chemistry was signed by Liveing and Dewar, but did not have the
approval of Thomson and Glazebrook: physics was considered an optional sub-
ject, not the centre of the tripos. This proposal was, nevertheless, turned down,
and Stuart resigned in 1889. A new professor was appointed on 12 November
1890. James Alfred Ewing was already Professor of Engineering and Drawing
at University College, Dundee, and this experience gave him the authority
to work successfully towards the creation of a Department of Engineering in
Cambridge.
54 J. J. Thomson’s early work in Cambridge

After the failed attempt to use the Engineering Tripos as a way to consoli-
date physics as the queen of sciences, Thomson and Glazebrook argued that the
optimal situation, as far as physics was concerned, would be that of a tripos in
which students could receive almost all the mathematical training acquired in
the Mathematical Tripos together with the physics and chemistry in the Natural
Science Tripos, without the need of doing the complete training of the first
years of the Mathematical Tripos. In a report submitted to the Senate House
of the university in 1890, they advocated a ‘mixed Tripos of Mathematics and
Physics’ (CUR, 1890, pp. 558–61). In this proposal, physics – and not chemistry –
would have been compulsory. This time the proposal was signed by Thomson,
but not by the Professors of Chemistry, and it was not approved by the univer-
sity. Also in the academic year 1891/92, discussions were held in order to split
the examination in physics and chemistry into two separate and independent
examinations in the Natural Science Tripos. The curriculum in chemistry was
to include a voluntary exercise in fundamental physics, mainly electricity, and
the curriculum in physics was also to include a voluntary exercise in chemistry.
These discussions point to a further separation between these disciplines from
a pedagogical and institutional point of view.
In 1894, the new Engineering Tripos was finally created, and Ewing managed
to convince the university to build a new building for his Department on the
recently purchased site between the Cavendish and the Chemistry Department.
He thought it ‘exceedingly desirable that if, or rather when, such buildings are
erected they should be close to the Cavendish and Chemical Laboratories, for
much of the work of students of engineering would be done in those places,
and proximity of the buildings would greatly facilitate the arrangement of lec-
ture hours, &c’ (CUR, 1891, p. 563). Far from achieving Thomson’s dream of
establishing physics as the queen of the physical sciences, the implementation
of the new tripos finally consolidated the split and subsequent specialization
of physics, chemistry, and engineering. In the definitive organisation of the
sciences in Cambridge, specialisation won out over Thomson’s dream of unifi-
cation of the ‘physical sciences’.
 3

The ether and the corpuscle:

from waves to particles

3.1 Electric discharge in tubes

Which comes first, theory or experiment? And, in any case, what

is theory? In the prologue to his Notes on Recent Researches on Electricity and
Magnetism, published in 1893 as a sequel to Maxwell’s Treatise, J. J. addressed
these questions with an eye on Cambridge Mathematical Tripos wranglers,
‘who have a great tendency to regard the whole of Maxwell’s theory as a
matter of the solution of certain differential equations, and to dispense with
any attempt to form themselves a mental picture of the physical processes
which accompany the phenomena they are investigating’ (Thomson, 1893,
p. v). In less than ten years as Cavendish Professor, J. J. had come across many
Cambridge graduates who, like himself over a decade earlier, could barely
perform a single experiment after more than three years of an exclusively
mathematical training, and who were largely oblivious to the relationship
between their mathematics and the phenomena in the laboratory. Research
was, for such graduates, nothing more than the task of solving more complex
mathematical problems based on already existing theories and formulae. This
could have, in the long term, hindered the advance of science for lack of cre-
ative ideas to guide new avenues of experimental research: ‘I think that this
state of things is to be regretted, since it retards the progress of the science
of Electricity and diminishes the value of the mental training afforded by the
study of that science’ (p. vi). And, with a hint of humour, he added:

The use of a physical theory will help to correct the tendency – which
I think all who have had occasion to examine in Mathematical
Physics will admit is by no means uncommon – to look on analytical
processes as the modern equivalents of the Philosopher’s Machine in

55
56 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

the Grand Academy of Lagado, and to regard as the normal process

of investigation in this subject the manipulation of a large number
of symbols in the hope that every now and then some valuable result
may happen to drop out (Thomson, 1893, p. vi).

With his emphasis on mental models, or, as he now called them, the ‘geomet-
rical and physical method’, J. J. Thomson was an advocate for the long standing
Victorian tradition that identified rationality with the production of mental
mechanical models to explain phenomena, which was regarded as the final
triumph of Newtonian mechanics: the paradigm of adult science of which we
spoke in the previous chapter. One of the big epistemological questions was,
of course, that of the actual reality of such mental models: were they purely
heuristic tools or real mechanisms in nature? Generally speaking, Victorian
physicists tended to favour the former, but admitting that even if the actual
mechanism invoked in each particular case might be wrong, there had to be
some mechanical process behind every physical phenomenon. Along these
lines, Thomson had argued for dynamical models in an earlier paper, saying
that ‘in the first place there is the mental satisfaction to be got by explain-
ing things on dynamical principles; and again, there is the certainty that the
method is capable of completely solving the question’, after which he added
in brackets the cautious statement ‘whether we can make it do so is another
matter’ (Thomson, 1887, p. 473).
In the preface of Notes on Recent Researches in Electricity and Magnetism,
J. J. acknowledged the dangers of taking models too seriously, since extrapola-
tions from them could lead to conclusions not justified by the corresponding
analytical theory. This, however, should not be a problem ‘if we remember
that the object of such theories is suggestion and not demonstration. Either
Experiment or rigorous Analysis must always be the final Court of Appeal; it
is the province of these physical theories to supply cases to be tried in such a
court’ (Thomson, 1893, p. vii). Mental models were, at least in this preface, a
highly recommended tool for suggesting new experiments and understanding
yet unexplained phenomena, as well as a way to further develop or polish a
given mathematical theory.
But did J. J. Thomson himself work along these lines? The answer to this
question is not straightforward. As Falconer (1985) thoroughly documented,
the relationship between theory and experiment in Thomson’s work was
always very loose, since he cared very little for quantitative precision and close
correspondence with experimental results. He was more interested in results
that were suggestive, and from which he could extrapolate and speculate on
new theories. In the 1880s, he was speculating on the nature of matter and
 3.1 Electric discharge in tubes 57

extrapolating, from the analysis of vortex rings, an overarching theory of every-

thing, without much reference to experimental results. As Cavendish Professor,
he started to experiment on electrical discharges in gases in what looks like a
haphazard collection of data on these phenomena; and that was partly the case.
Convinced, as Maxwell was, that electric discharge in tubes was a most import-
ant phenomenon, not so much due to ‘the beauty of the experiments, as to the
wide-spread conviction that there is perhaps no other branch of physics which
affords us so promising an opportunity of penetrating the secret of electricity’
(Thomson, 1893, p. 53), J. J. had first to familiarize himself with the methods
and techniques involved in such experiments, as well as justifying the academic
validity of this field of research. Actually, reference to the beauty of discharge
tubes is not accidental: it was quite common in Victorian popular science to
treat the colours and shapes of the light obtained in experiments of electrical
discharge in gases as a source of entertainment in science lectures for popular
audiences. Thomson’s first challenge was to legitimize an experimental field
that, in words of Arthur Schuster some decades later, ‘had better be left to be
played by cranks and visionaries’ (Schuster, 1911, p. 52). That is partly why the
second chapter of Recent Researches was wholly devoted to a qualitative survey
of all the phenomena known about electric discharge through gases, a topic on
which ‘there is no summary in English text books’ (Thomson, 1893, p. 53).
The link between theory and experiment was loose, in the sense that
Thomson used his (many) qualitative observations and (fewer) quantitative
results to illustrate a theory of dissociation based on his vortex ring theory
of the atom. Until about 1890, his work on electric discharge in tubes played
a crucial role neither in shaping his theories on electricity and matter, nor in
the design of experiments to prove or disprove his models. His main interest,
both in his pre-1890 theories and in his experiments, was to discuss electric
discharge in gases in terms of the dissipation of electric energy. This was in nat-
ural congruence with his overall aim of uniting physics and chemistry through
the application of dynamics. Only after 1890 did his attention turn towards the
exploration of the transfer of electric charge, a change that came hand in hand
with his abandonment of the vortex ring theory of the atom.
The first instalment in a long series of speculations to understand electric
discharge appeared in the Philosophical Magazine as early as 1883, a year before
he was elected director of the Cavendish Laboratory, which shows that his
interest in the topic preceded his appointment. Certainly, his new job trig-
gered a long series of experiments, which, had he remained only a mathemat-
ical physicist, he might never have had the chance to perform (de Solla Price,
1957). The fundamental elements of this 1883 theory, which remained basic-
ally unaltered until around 1890, were based on his vortex ring model of the
58 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

atom and on the Clausius and Williamson dissociation theory, ‘according to

which the molecules of a compound gas are supposed not to always consist of
the same atoms of the elementary gases, but that these atoms are continually
changing partners’ (Thomson, 1883c, p. 428). Thomson proved mathematically
that, under certain circumstances, two vortex rings travelling in the same dir-
ection could eventually form a mechanically stable system. In that case, both
rings would unite and travel together. In his usual speculative style, he went
on to suppose that ‘the union or pairing in this way of two vortex rings of
different kinds is what takes place when two elements of which these vortex
rings are atoms combine chemically’ (p. 427). We should note that Thomson
was here considering two vortex rings as the components of the gas molecules,
even in those cases where the gas was known to be composed of three or more
elements. Thus, one vortex ring could represent one atom, or more than one
atom, or, as we saw in the previous chapter, one atom could be represented by
a number of vortex rings.
Thomson then introduced the concept of the ratio between paired and free
time, i.e., the ratio between the time vortex rings were bound together form-
ing a molecule, and the time they were on their own. This ratio would depend
on the temperature and the pressure of the gas. When dissociated, a gas no
longer exhibited the properties of the chemical compound, but rather of its
constituent elements, and this would happen when the ratio between paired
and free time was small enough. The presence of an electric field, which in the
Maxwellian paradigm was a tension along the lines of force in the ether, would
be responsible for an increase in the energy in the gas with effects analogous
to those observed with a rise of temperature: at first, this increase in energy
would translate into more mechanical energy of the compound molecules with-
out any chemical change (i.e., without dissociation); but, as the energy kept
rising, the ratio between paired and free time of the molecules would reach a
threshold beyond which the gas dissociated. The process of dissociation would
absorb much of the energy, thus discharging the electric field, and the later
recombination would emit energy in the form of heat, with the characteristic
light patterns of this kind of discharge. In his words,

The disturbance to which the gas in an electric field is subjected

makes the molecules break up sooner into atoms than they otherwise
would do, and thus diminishes the ratio of the paired to the free
times of the atoms of the gas; as the intensity of the electric field
increases, the disturbance in some places may become so violent that
in these regions the ratio of the paired to the free times approaches
the value it has when the gas is about to be dissociated. At this
 3.1 Electric discharge in tubes 59

point any diminution of this ratio consequent upon an increase in

the intensity of the field will absorb a large amount of energy; this
energy must come from the electric field; and we should thus get the
phenomenon of the electric discharge (Thomson, 1883c, p. 431).

Following the argument of the previous chapter, it is worthwhile noting that

this discharge mechanism was in tune with Thomson’s interest in bridging the
gap between physics and chemistry, and in trying to develop a chemical theory
based on dynamics.
From this model of discharge, Thomson inferred that one experimental mag-
nitude central to his theory and worth measuring was the ‘electric strength
of gases’, i.e., the maximum potential a gas could support without discharge,
thinking that this would turn out to be a characteristic quantity for each gas.
But his experiments up to 1890 showed that the electric strength was far from
being a fundamental of gases, since it depended on other factors related to the
electrodes, such as their material, kind of surface, shape, size, and separation.
In 1886, Thomson extended his vortex ring dissociation theory to also explain
the asymmetry of the discharge the positive and the negative poles. One of the
basic visual features of the electric discharge in rarefied gases is that the pat-
tern is clearly different at the two extremes of the tube. The region immedi-
ately adjacent to the cathode (called the ‘Crookes space’ or ‘dark space’) varied
in length depending on the conditions inside the tube, but not on the mater-
ial from which the cathode was made. Next came the negative glow, another
dark space known as the Faraday space, and finally a collection of striations. In
a totally qualitative and highly speculative paper (Thomson, 1886), Thomson
started from the consideration that a gas molecule was composed of two simi-
lar vortex rings on parallel planes and with their centres on the same axis. In
the presence of an electric field, the molecule would move in the direction of
the lines of force or in the opposite direction. Using hydrodynamic consider-
ations, J. J. argued that the tension in the lines of force in the ether increased
the radii of the vortex rings. Thus, the two rings forming a molecule moving in
the direction of the lines of force would have different diameters. An increase
in the radius of one ring would, of course, affect its speed and, thus, the two
rings would move apart from each other if the molecule was moving in the dir-
ection of the field (or closer together, if moving in the opposite direction).
With this in mind, J. J. suggested that molecules of this kind would have a
greater tendency to split closer to the negative than to the positive electrode,
which, in turn, would explain the darkness in the ‘Crookes space’. The nega-
tive glow would be the consequence of the recombination of the vortex rings
into molecules, a light-emitting process. Beyond this, the intensity of the field
60 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

would no longer be high enough to give rise to any further molecular splitting,
thus explaining the dark interval. To account for the pattern close to the posi-
tive electrode, J. J. fixed his attention on the molecules moving away from the
positive electrode. The phenomenon was qualitatively the same as in the prox-
imity of the negative electrode, except for the fact that, following the hydro-
dynamic implications of his model, molecules had less tendency to split close
to the positive electrode than to the negative.
This might sound like an extremely speculative and ad hoc model, but we
should not forget that the problem of asymmetry between the positive and
negative electrodes was a constant source of headache for all scientists work-
ing in this field, as well as an unending source of inspiration for the Victorian
scientist given to speculation and modelling. The problem would only be even-
tually solved by the corpuscle-electron and the essential asymmetry between
positive and negatively electrified particles.

3.2 From discharge tubes to Faraday tubes

Recent Researches contains a comprehensive up-to-date survey of experi-

ments and theories related to the latest advances in electromagnetism since the
publication of Maxwell’s Treatise. As we just saw, the second chapter included
all the experimental progress in the field of electric discharge in gases. But
by 1893, when he published this volume, J. J. had already abandoned his vor-
tex ring theory. The two most relevant new ideas in the book were his new
interpretation based on Faraday tubes and Hertz’s experiments proving the
existence of electromagnetic waves. The former form the core of the first chap-
ter, while the latter appear only in Chapter 5. This may lead the reader to the
wrong conclusion that Hertz’s experiments were unrelated to the formulation
of the theory of Faraday tubes.
In 1888, Hertz obtained indisputable evidence for the existence of electro-
magnetic waves and, indirectly, for the existence of the ether, as opposed to
the typically Continental idea of action-at-a-distance. The reception of Hertz’s
experiments in Britain was more than enthusiastic, since they seemed to
finally prove the validity of Maxwell’s framework (Hunt, 1991, pp. 158–62). J. J.
Thomson was one of many British physicists to replicate the experiments and
to regard them as the experimentum crucis for the Maxwellian world-view; but his
work was also influenced by one particular technique that Hertz had developed
to obtain rapidly alternating currents. As early as 1881, Thomson had longed
for an experimental way to test the constancy of the specific inductive capacity
at high frequencies (Falconer, 1985, p. 67). Between 1888 and 1890, after learn-
ing about Hertz’s technique, he slowed down the pace of his experiments on
 3.2 From discharge tubes to Faraday tubes 61

electric discharge to test Maxwell’s theory at high frequencies. His main inter-
est was the relationship between the velocity of propagation of electrical dis-
turbances in a conductor and that in the dielectric surrounding the conductor,
since Hertz’s experiments seemed to suggest that the two velocities were dif-
ferent, whereas, according to Maxwell, they should be the same. Thomson per-
formed experiments not only on solids, but also in liquids and gases (the latter
being his main field of expertise) and proved that there was no great difference
between the two velocities, which lent further support to the Maxwellian trad-
ition (Thomson, 1889a, c, d). But in doing so, he also showed that the velocity
of discharge in tubes, a magnitude that had so far been neglected in his vortex
ring theory, was unexpectedly close to the speed of light. The inevitable conse-
quence was his progressive abandonment of the theory based on vortex rings.
Interestingly, however, J. J. did not present the transformation of his theory as
a dramatic change in his views, but underlined the continuity between the old
and new theories by emphasizing what remained unchanged. In 1890, he wrote
that the new results were ‘in accordance with the view of the electric discharge
through gases which I gave in the Philosophical Magazine for June 1883’, the basic
premise of which was that ‘the provision of a supply of atoms by the splitting
up of the molecules is the essential accompaniment of the electric discharge
through gases’ (Thomson, 1890a, p. 359). Consistent with his epistemological
considerations on the role of models, J. J. apparently abandoned the vortex ring
theory without much trauma, partly because he was keeping some of the basic
elements that it contained, specifically the dissociation of molecules into atoms.
The great change, however, was that this dissociation no longer took place on
the basis of dynamical considerations, but on electrical ones:

We may regard the atoms in the molecule as being in oppositely

polarized states; one atom behaving as if it were charged with a
quantity of positive electricity, the other as if it were charged with
an equal quantity of negative. When the atoms are together in the
molecule they neutralize each other’s action at points outside the
molecule, which behaves as if it were electrically neutral; but as soon
as the atoms separate, since each one is essentially polarized, the
gas acquires energetic electrical properties, and by the motion of its
atoms electricity can be carried from one part of the gas to another.
The ease with which the gas can be made to conduct electricity
depends upon the ease with which its molecules can be split up into
atoms (Thomson, 1890a, p. 359).

This move from directly dynamic considerations towards electric argu-

ments was also partly motivated by J. J.’s renewed interest in electrolysis: the
62 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

similarities between it and discharge in tubes were too strong to be neglected,

even though the common explanations of electrolysis based on the existence
of molecular charges were not well regarded by Maxwellians.1 At the same
time, however, Thomson’s experiments on the rate of propagation of electric
discharge, which showed it to be close to the speed of light, meant that the
motion of charged atoms or molecules was simply not enough to account for
this high speed, since charged atoms were not energetic enough: ‘The very
rapid rate with which the electric discharge is propagated through a rare gas
compels us to admit that the electricity is not carried by charged atoms mov-
ing with this velocity’ (Thomson, 1890c, p. 132). That is why he needed to
introduce some structure in the dielectric that would act, like a wire in the
case of electricity in solids, as a channel for conduction. Thomson was trying
to combine in one model the discreteness of electrification with the continuity
of the medium. With this in mind, he first introduced a mechanism based on
Grotthus chains, and, soon afterwards, his Faraday tubes of force.
The former he presented in the following terms:

Before the electric field is intense enough to cause discharge,

the induction in the field polarizes the gas. We may regard this
polarization as being equivalent to the formation of chains of
molecules analogous to the ‘Grotthus chain’ in electrolysis. As the
intensity of the field increases, suppose the molecules in one of
these chains near an electrode, say the negative, interchange their
atoms; and that it is not merely those molecules which are next the electrode
which split up, but that the decomposition of the molecules extends along an
appreciable length of the chain. The positively electrified atoms will
cling to the negative electrode, and after a time, depending upon the
number of free atoms, the distance between them, and their mutual
attractions, the chain will resume its original molecular condition
(Thomson, 1890c, p. 132, emphasis in the original).

Grotthus chains were an old mechanism conceived by Theodore von Grotthus

and by Humphry Davy at the beginning of nineteenth century, and reintro-
duced by Faraday in 1833, to account for the transmission of electricity in elec-
trolysis (Darrigol, 2000, p. 81). J. J. was suggesting that, in a tube filled with a

1
In the Treatise, Maxwell (1873) had written: ‘This theory of molecular charges may serve
as a method by which we may remember a good many facts about electrolysis. It is
extremely improbable however that when we come to understand the true nature of
electrolysis we shall retain in any form the theory of molecular charges, for then we
shall obtained a secure basis on which to form a true theory of electric currents, and so
become independent of these provisional theories’ (§269).
 3.2 From discharge tubes to Faraday tubes 63

rarefied gas and in the presence of an electric force, the continuous association
and dissociation of molecules into two oppositely charged ions was guided by
the electric force. From his point of view, there was observational evidence for
this mechanism, since ‘this breaking-up of the current into a series of separate
pieces shows itself in the stratifications observed when the discharge passes
through a gas at low pressure’ (Thomson, 1890c, p. 133). The Grotthus chain
thus kept the association and dissociation of molecules that had been present
in his vortex-ring theory while, at the same time, introduced the quantification
of electric charge that was common in the explanations of electrolysis.
The final change on his views on electricity occurred only a few months
later, when J. J. presented his idea of Faraday tubes, an idea that not only helped
one visualize the arrangement of Grotthus chains, but also eventually became
the main structure on which to base an all-embracing theory of electrodynam-
ics. The first public appearance of these tubes was in a paper in Philosophical
Magazine on early 1891, and J. J. gave the following justification:

Methods such as this, of materializing, as it were, mathematical

conceptions, seem to have a use even where, as in the case of
Electricity, the analytical theory is well established; for any method
which enables us to form a mental picture of what goes on in the
electric field has a freshness and a power of rapidly giving the main
features of a phenomenon, as distinct from the details, which few
can hope to derive from purely analytical methods. Experience has,
I think, shown that Maxwell’s conception of electric displacement
is of somewhat too general a character to lend itself easily to the
formation of a conception of a mechanism which would illustrate
by its working the processes going on in the electric field. For this
purpose the conception of tubes of electrostatic induction introduced
by Faraday seems to possess many advantages. If we regard these
tubes as having a real physical existence, we may, as I shall endeavour
to show, explain the various electrical processes, – such as the passage
of electricity through metals, liquids, or gases, the production of a
current, magnetic force, the induction of currents, and so on, – as
arising from the contraction or elongation of such tubes and their
motion through the electric field (Thomson, 1891, pp. 149–50).

This long statement deserves some attention since it summarizes one of the
problems that plagued Faraday tubes throughout their existence in the mind
and work of J. J. Thomson. The tubes were first introduced as a visual tool that
might help explain phenomena and guide research on something that was, in
principle, already fully explained by Maxwell’s notion of electric displacement.
64 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

Here, the heuristic character of Faraday tubes seems obvious. But later on, he
tells us that we have to think of Faraday tubes as having a ‘real, physical exist-
ence’, and not only as mental tools for suggesting further research. As we shall
see, many of the properties of electricity can be ascribed to the mechanical and
dynamical properties of the Faraday tubes. The different layers of reality that
J. J. used in the vortex ring theory were equally present here. In the former,
atoms were real, but they were, at a more fundamental level, epiphenomena
of the ether. Faraday tubes were also structures of the ether and, thus, had the
‘same, real existence’ as the ether itself. Furthermore, as this long quotation
shows, J. J. Thomson did not introduce the Faraday tubes as a tool to fill a gap
in one particular explanation, but as the basic structure of the ether on which
to base the understanding of all electromagnetic phenomena. This is particu-
larly clear in the structure of Recent Researches. The book was designed as a step
forward from Maxwell’s Treatise and took Faraday tubes as the new, alternative,
foundation stone on which to base further developments in the science of elec-
tricity. That is why the first chapter was devoted exclusively to introducing the
reader to the properties of the tubes and their use in describing all electrical
and magnetic phenomena.
But, what are Faraday tubes exactly? Electrostatically, they are unit tubes of
electrostatic induction, all with the same strength corresponding to the elec-
trolytic unit of charge. Mechanically, they are structures in the ether in the
form of vortical tubes that begin and terminate in matter or form closed cir-
cuits. These tubes have a direction and the atoms on which they begin and end
receive a unit of positive and negative electrification respectively. To support
his new theoretical device, J. J. stressed that these structures were already pre-
sent in the work of Faraday and Maxwell, at least in the first sense of connect-
ing positive and negatively electrified bodies (without the possibility of closed
loops). In doing this, he portrayed his ideas as a continuation of the work of
the two main British authorities on electricity and magnetism. In fact, J. J. in
the Treatise explicitly quoted Maxwell’s description of how to generate a tube
of induction force from a line of force: ‘If the line of force moves so that its
beginning traces a closed curve on the positive surface, its end will trace a cor-
responding closed curve on the negative surface, and the line of force itself will
generate a tubular surface called a tube of induction’ (Maxwell, 1873, §82). But,
as Darrigol pointed out, Thomson’s Faraday tubes were a complex hybrid of
concepts from Faraday and Maxwell, as well as from William Hicks, Poynting,
Helmholtz and Schuster, whom J. J. characteristically did not mention at all
(Darrigol, 2000, p. 269).
As with the vortex ring theory, Faraday tubes were structures emerging
from the dynamics of the ether. Even though, in the first instance, J. J. did
 3.2 From discharge tubes to Faraday tubes 65

not speculate on the way the tubes were constituted, the analogies with vorti-
cal movements were ubiquitous. Thus, at the beginning of Recent Researches he
said that ‘The property of the Faraday tubes of always forming closed circuits
or else having their ends on atoms may be illustrated by the similar property
possessed by tubes of vortex motion in a frictionless fluid, these tubes either
form closed circuits or have their ends on the boundary of the liquid in which
the vortex motion takes place’ (Thomson, 1893, pp. 3–4). And, at the end of the
first chapter, he emphasized the same idea, saying that ‘the analogies which
exist between their properties and those of tubes of vortex motion irresistibly
suggest that we should look at rotatory motion in the ether for their explan-
ation’ (p. 52).
The rotating movement of the ether in and around Faraday tubes explained
electric and magnetic phenomena along the lines of the general framework
already set out in Applications of Dynamics to Physics and Chemistry (Thomson,
1888): the kinetic energy due to these vortical movements constituted the
potential energy of the electrostatic field, ‘while when the tubes themselves
are in [translatory] motion we have super-added to this another distribution of
velocity whose energy constitutes that of the magnetic field’ (Thomson, 1893,
p. 5). And he developed the mathematics of these assumptions, introducing
the notion of polarization which was ‘mathematically identical with Maxwell’s
“displacement”’, but had ‘a different interpretation’ (p. 6). Since the ends of
Faraday tubes had opposite electrifications, a tube had direction. Polarization
at one point of a dielectric was a vector quantity that represented the density
and direction of Faraday tubes of force per unit volume. Since Faraday tubes in
a dielectric ‘cannot be created nor destroyed’, a change in polarization could
take place only when tubes moved or deformed. And, from these changes in
polarization, which, at the end of the day, were dynamical changes treatable
with the usual methods of dynamics, Thomson showed the direct connec-
tion between his method and the energy transfers obtained using Poynting’s
vector.
Two atoms would form a stable molecule when united by a short tube of
force, i.e., a Faraday tube of molecular dimensions. At this stage, however, he
did not speculate much on the relationship between Faraday tubes and atoms
of ordinary matter. In his previous vortex theory, all phenomena were sup-
posed to be manifestations of the ethereal vortex rings and their movements
in the ether. There was no asymmetry between ether and matter precisely
because, in a way, matter did not exist as essentially distinct from the ether
but only as a manifestation of it. Furthermore, and more importantly, there
was only one kind of structure in the ether: the vortex rings. Now, on the other
hand, atoms were essentially different from the Faraday tubes, since these
66 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

Figure 3.1 The mechanism of electric discharge in rarefied gases using Faraday
tubes (Thomson, 1893, p. 46). By permission of Oxford University Press.

ended – or ‘fell’, as he normally said – on atoms. It was not until 1895 that he
actually started to think explicitly the relationship between Faraday tubes,
ether, and atoms.
But, to continue with the story of electric discharge in tubes, let us look at
the role of Faraday tubes in this process. Figure 3.1, taken from Recent Researches,
is quite self-explanatory: the short Faraday tubes AB, CD and EF represent mol-
ecules of the gas which, in the presence of a field between the ends of the tube,
represented by the long tube OP, line up in the direction of the field. The mol-
ecules of the gas thus polarized attract the long tube OP, since this is of oppos-
ite sign to AB, CD and EF. When the field is strong enough, there is a splitting of
the tubes, which means a splitting of the molecules, creating a Grotthus chain.
In his usual style of extrapolating without much justification, J. J. assumed that
a similar process happened in all media, including solid metals.
This mechanism kept the main ideas that he had developed around 1890.
Discharge of electricity through gases involved molecular dissociation, but a
dissociation that had its foundation in electrical considerations (Faraday tubes)
and no longer in energy considerations (vortex rings). Faraday tubes had intro-
duced a previously neglected discreteness in the electric charge, which was
consistent with the science of electrolysis: following Maxwell, electric charge
had to be a phenomenon arising at the interface between ether and matter, but
the presence of Faraday tubes, a discrete structure of a continuous medium,
allowed for discreteness in charge without contradicting the essentially con-
tinuous Maxwellian paradigm.
 3.3 Tubes, electricity, and matter 67

3.3 Tubes, electricity, and matter

The concept of Faraday tubes brought about a shift towards an atomiza-

tion in the structure of electricity and, indirectly, towards the notion of discrete
charge. Prior to 1890, J. J. did not think in terms of discrete charges but rather
in terms of exchanges of energy. The analogy with electrolysis and the use of
Faraday tubes changed things: charge became a phenomenon at the interface
between ether and matter, between Faraday tubes and matter, and, since the
former had a fixed and specific strength, the magnitude of electric charge was
not continuous but discrete. If the tubes of force were real physical entities,
and not merely ideal devices, there should be an actual physical limit to their
divisibility. This idea opened the door to a quantification of energy and charge
within the framework of a continuous ether: discreteness was not an essential
quality of the ether, as other contemporary theories suggested. In other words,
Faraday tubes allowed for a theory in which electric charge was at the same
time discrete and a boundary phenomenon, not a substance. In a very program-
matic statement, he wrote:

From our point of view, this method of looking at electrical

phenomena may be regarded as forming a kind of molecular theory of
Electricity, the Faraday tubes taking the place of the molecules in the
Kinetic Theory of Gases: the object of the method being to explain the
phenomena of the electric field as due to the motion of these tubes,
just as it is the object of the Kinetic Theory of Gases to explain the
properties of a gas as due to the motion of its molecules. These tubes
also resemble the molecules of a gas in another respect, as we regard
them as incapable of destruction or creation (Thomson, 1893, p. 4).

The analogy between the structure of the electric field and the kinetic theory
of gases is quite revealing since it immediately raises the question of what
happens with matter: is it still to be regarded as atomic and, if so, what is the
relationship between atoms and the Faraday tubes? These questions were not
addressed when Faraday tubes were first suggested, and only started to creep
in through the relationship between electrification and chemical action, via
electrolysis, as well as through the problem of asymmetry in the discharge
patterns. Because, if electrolysis showed a constancy in the charge while the
patterns were clearly asymmetric in a tube, there could only be one explan-
ation: the structure of molecules had necessarily to account for such asym-
metry between positively and negatively charged atoms.
After the publication of Recent Researches, Thomson began a series of experi-
ments on the electrolysis of steam and, later, a broader analysis on the
68 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

electrolysis of gases, to see if he could still stand behind his idea that ‘the dis-
charge through gases is accompanied by chemical changes analogous to those
which take place in electrolytes conveying currents’ (Thomson, 1894b, p. 92).
The results he obtained were somewhat puzzling and difficult to account for
since, contrary to what was normally the case in the electrolysis of solutions,
the sign of the charges of the elements in the electrolysis of gases was not
always the same. In solutions, ‘the persistency of the sign of the electric charge
carried by an ion is almost as marked a feature as the constancy of the mag-
nitude of the charge’, while that was not the case in the electrolysis of gases:
‘here an atom of hydrogen does not always carry a positive charge, nor an atom
of chlorine always a negative one; each of these atoms sometimes carries a
negative charge, sometimes a positive one’ (Thomson, 1895a, p. 511). On first
analysis, this seemed to undermine much of Thomson’s idea that electrolysis
and discharge were strongly related phenomena; but, after some thought, the
idea that there was an asymmetry between positive and negative electrification
was reinforced: even in the case of elementary diatomic gases like hydrogen,
ions behaved chemically differently when electrified positively or negatively.
In other words, the different behaviour at the positive and negative electrodes
reflected the asymmetry between positive and negative electrification, irre-
spective of the substance that was being electrified (Thomson, 1895a, p. 255).
Following this thread, J. J. now sensed that electrification of molecules and
chemical action were two sides of the same coin and, therefore, he sought
to understand this relationship better. This led him to speculate more expli-
citly on the relationship between charge and matter, making use of his Faraday
tubes:

The connexion between ordinary matter and the electrical charges on

the atom is evidently a matter of fundamental importance, and one
which must be closely related to a good many of the most chemical
as well as electrical phenomena. In fact a complete explanation of
this connexion would probably go a long way towards establishing a
theory of the constitution of matter as well as of the mechanism of
the electric field. It seems therefore to be of interest to look on this question
from as many points of view as possible, and to consider the consequences
which might be expected to follow from any method of explaining, or rather
illustrating, the preference which some elements show for one kind of electricity
rather than the other (Thomson, 1895b, p. 512, my emphasis).

I emphasized the last sentence because, at that time, and true to his impli-
cit philosophy of science, J. J. did not seem to think of this particular model
based on Faraday tubes as any more ontologically real than other models.
 3.3 Tubes, electricity, and matter 69

Furthermore, he was directly interested at that time not in building a model

of matter, but in understanding the relationship between electrification and
chemical action, or valency. While the Grotthus-chain mechanism had given
him an explanation of the velocity of discharge, he now needed a theory that
could account for electrification. That the new model he developed did not give
a satisfactory explanation of the velocity of discharge was not important since,
for him, models were only explanatory tools for particular problems, and there
was no need for full consistency between models, as the above quote shows.
The contrast between the earlier vortex atom theory and the new Faraday
tubes was made explicit in this 1895 heuristic model, where Thomson argued
that the new theory was only a step, perhaps an important one, towards a
better understanding of the nature of matter. In his words,

Now let us consider the atoms on which these tubes end. Let us
suppose that these atoms have a structure possessing similar
properties to those which the atoms would possess if they contained
a number of gyrostats all spinning in one way round the outwardly
drawn normals to their surface. Then one of these atoms will be
differently affected by a Faraday tube, and will possess different
amounts of energy according as the tubes begins or ends on its
surface (Thomson, 1895b, p. 513).

Two things are important here: the totally heuristic character of the rotating
gyrostats, and his sticking to rotating movements as the main characteristic on
which to focus. Like in the vortex ring theory, here he speaks of a certain struc-
ture within the atom. With this model, he also tried to account for the affinity
of elements and the formation of molecules, which was consistent with his
idea of giving chemistry the status of a science dependent on physical models.
Affinity was here understood as a consequence of the way that Faraday tubes
ended the atoms. The atoms were described in terms of gyroscopic structures,
and the moment of momentum created by the interaction of a Faraday tube
with the vorticity and the momentum of the atom explained the different affin-
ities between different kinds of atoms. The gyroscopic structures also accounted
for the electrochemical behaviour of atoms. Thus, chemical behaviour could be
explained in terms of physical mechanisms and not simply as the result of
electrical forces. As an example, Thomson cited the apparent asymmetry in the
bond between hydrogen and chlorine: a negatively electrified hydrogen atom
and a positive chlorine atom would experience less attractive force than a posi-
tive hydrogen atom and a negative chlorine atom, although the electrostatic
force was the same, due to the different rotational action of the gyrostats on
the also rotating Faraday tubes. This is what Thomson meant when he said that
70 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

‘when charged atoms are close together, there may be forces partly electrical,
partly chemical, in their origin in addition to those expressed by the ordinary
laws of electrostatics’ (Thomson, 1895b, p. 518).
Following the chemical side of this model, Thomson discussed a few simple
cases so as to show that electrostatic attraction was not the only condition for
two ions to form a chemical compound. Thus, for instance, in a solution with
hydrogen and chlorine, both molecular compounds would be split into atoms,
each with positive and negative electricity. With only electric arguments, all
atoms would be able to form molecules of HCl, with positive Hs and negative
Cls interacting as well as negative Hs with positive Cls. But in the latter case,
and due to the torsion of the Faraday tube potentially uniting both atoms, there
would be repulsion rather than attraction. Only when both atoms managed to
exchange the sign of their electrification would this torsion cease to be repul-
sive and the HCl bond easily take place. This charge exchange could only take
place in the presence of a field different from the one created by the two indi-
vidual atoms; a field that would force the atoms close enough so as to exchange
the sign of their electrification or, what amounts to the same thing, so that
it forced a shift in the extremes of the Faraday tube potentially linking both
atoms. From here, he inferred a general law by which ‘Chemical action does
not (in general) take place between a single pair of molecules alone in the field,
but requires the formation of aggregates either of the interacting molecules or
of some third substance which is either a conductor of electricity or has a large
specific inductive capacity’ (Thomson, 1895a, p. 528).
Significantly, the importance he accorded to the mechanisms of electrolysis
to account for the discharge in gases enabled him to develop and work with the
ideas of discrete matter and charge. The conflict between discreteness and con-
tinuum had to be resolved in the case of both matter and electricity. Maxwell’s
theory assumed a continuum displacement, not discrete charges. Thomson’s
theory of Faraday tubes helped him to think of charge as a phenomenon at
their ends.

3.4 Opening the Cavendish to new researchers

In 1871, Cambridge saw the establishment of a hall of residence for

women, which would eventually become Newnham Hall. Residents were enti-
tled to attend lectures in the university but, of course, these women were not
granted degrees or even formally admitted as registered members of the uni-
versity. Little by little, and ‘by the courtesy of the Examiners, women had been
allowed to take the papers and these had been marked. Their place in the Tripos
was not published in the University list, but it was not kept secret’ (Thomson,
 3.4 Opening the Cavendish to new researchers 71

1936, p. 83). Embarrassment came when some of these women began to obtain
high marks. The most impressive case happened in 1890, when Philipa Fawcett
was ranked – of course, informally – above the senior wrangler, making national
headlines in The Times (Warwick, 2003a, p. 218).
Lord Rayleigh was relatively forward-looking in regard to women’s educa-
tion and, from 1882, female students could attend demonstrations and lectures
at the Cavendish. So, when Thomson was appointed director of the laboratory,
women were a part, however small, of the landscape of the institution. One
such young lady was Rose Paget, daughter of the Regius Professor of Physic, i.e.,
medicine, in Cambridge, who was interested in physics, although her formal
training in advanced mathematics was quite limited. She attended some basic
demonstrations at the Cavendish in 1887 and Thomson’s own lectures in 1888.
The letters between professor and student evolved from the very formal ‘Dear
Miss Paget’ of March and August 1889 to the more friendly ‘My dear Miss Paget’
and to the unequivocal ‘My darling Rose’ the day before the formal engage-
ment at the end of 1889 (Davis & Falconer, 1997, pp. xix – xx). The marriage
took place on 2 January 1890, and the couple had two children: George Paget
Thomson (G. P.), born on 3 May 1892 in the then family home of 6 Scroope
Terrace, and in 1903, a daughter, Joan, in their new home on West Road.
Rose, familiarly known in Cambridge as ‘Mrs J. J.’, became an essential part
of the laboratory, although not for her scientific work. She soon took on the
task of helping J. J. to make the Cavendish an agreeable place where research
was not incompatible with some degree of social engagement. She decided to
contribute to the weekly discussions in the Cavendish with tea and biscuits
she prepared, as well as making their family home as a sort of social annex
the laboratory to entertain other fellows, professors, students, and visiting
researchers. In his recollections, G. P. Thomson referred to weekly dinners,
usually held on Saturdays, ‘to which research students from the laboratory also
came’ (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 10).
The social dimension of the Thomsons’ household became especially rele-
vant in the years immediately after 1895, with the change in regulations at the
University of Cambridge and their dramatic consequences for the Cavendish.
German universities had been increasingly attracting graduate students from
all over the world to not only improve their research skills but also to obtain
Ph.D. degrees, which were very useful for obtaining university professorships.
English universities were slow in implementing research degrees, thus discour-
aging young scientists in the British domains from improving their scientific
training within the confines of the empire. The question turned into a political
issue when it became clear that, as a consequence, British talent was contrib-
uting to the development of foreign (especially German) science. There was a
72 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

clear need for change, especially in the Oxbridge system, to prevent this brain-
drain.
In 1895, the Senate of the university decided that graduates from other
universities were eligible to become research students in Cambridge, and
new degrees were created: a Certificate of Research or a B.A., depending on
the duration of residence at the university. Institutions like the Cavendish
Laboratory, initially created for demonstrations to undergraduate students or
for the personal research of the local professors, were the largest beneficiaries
of the new regulations: they could now attract brilliant students from else-
where, and thus enhance research with new and fresh ideas. Young men from
England, Scotland and Ireland, as well as from Australia, New Zealand, Canada
and the USA, immediately took advantage of this new possibility. The initial
list includes people such as E. Rutherford, J. S. Townsend, J. A. McClelland, C. G.
Barkla, J. A. Cunningham, and J. McLennan, many of whom eventually became
major actors in the history of physics (Kim, 2002, p. 98).
Mr and Mrs J. J. were instrumental in making newcomers feel at home, since
it was not always easy for them, without the long undergraduate training in
the traditions of the colleges, to integrate into the insular world of Cambridge.
Furthermore, not everyone was happy about having outsiders in their midst
not only for fear that they might change the ethos of the university, but also
because the skills and abilities of the newcomers were often superior to their
own. Rutherford’s letters sent to his fiancée in New Zealand on his arrival in
Cambridge are a valuable contemporary snapshot of the Thomsons’ care for
the newcomers:

I went to the lab and saw Thomson and had a good long talk with
him. He is very pleasant in conversation and is not fossilised at all.
As regards appearance he is a medium sized man, dark and quite
youthful still; shaves very badly and wears his hair rather long. His
face is rather long and thin; has a good head and has a couple of
vertical furrows just above his nose. We discussed matters in general
and research work and he seemed pleased with what I was going
to do. He asked me up to lunch to Scroope Terrace where I saw
his wife, a tall dark woman, rather sallow in complexion, but very
talkative and affable. Stayed an hour or so after dinner … I like Mr &
Mrs both very much. She tries to make me feel at home as much as
possible and he will talk about all sorts of subjects and not shop at all
(Rutherford, 8 December 1895, in Wilson, 1983, p. 64).

The new situation brought about an impressive flourishing of ideas and research
topics. While, prior to 1895, Thomson and other fellows at the laboratory like
 3.5 The corpuscle: notes from a ‘discovery’ 73

Glazebrook or Searle had undertaken their own private research and projects,
the coming of new blood triggered the emergence of what some call the
‘Cavendish school’, a set of interrelated research topics to which J. J. contrib-
uted by giving a lot of advice and from which he, and everyone else at the
Cavendish, also benefitted (Kim, 2002, p. 114–8; Rayleigh, 1942, p. 66). Actually,
the new situation suited someone like Thomson: he was a vibrant source of
ideas and suggestions which he would otherwise never have put into practice,
partly for want of time, but also because of his lack of interest in finding pre-
cise proofs for and the final development of any given suggestion. As we shall
see in the next section, J. J.’s long road towards a theory of conduction of elec-
tricity in gases reached its culmination at the end of the century partly thanks
to the collaborative work in the ‘Cavendish school’, with the invaluable help of
some of the new researchers, especially Rutherford (Falconer, 1985, p. 233).
At the same time, the laboratory had to accommodate increasing numbers
of local undergraduate students attending lecture courses and demonstra-
tions. By 1894, on average 200 students per term were filling the rooms of the
Cavendish and space, which had always been limited, became a rare commod-
ity. The university donated the land in Free School Lane adjacent to the existing
building, and provided half the budget for a much-reduced construction plan.
The other half, about £2000, came from the laboratory itself. This brings us to
another aspect of J. J. as a science manager that has always been highlighted:
his ability to run a demanding institution like the Cavendish, with increasing
international prestige, on very limited economic resources, to the extent that
some of his students and collaborators thought him extremely stingy. In fact,
the university gave a very small annual allowance to the Cavendish, one that
paid only for the salaries of the regular staff. The rest of the costs, including
that of research materials, were met by the fees that students had to pay for the
lectures and demonstrations they attended, and by ad hoc donations that J. J.
managed to obtain. From these, he saved, in ten years, enough money to pay
for half of the much-needed extension (Kim, 2002, pp. 79–83).
The formal inauguration of the new buildings took place in March 1896,
just in time to meet the demands for space of the graduate newcomers. New
buildings and new people coincided with the finding of new types of radiation,
which that very year started to populate every physics laboratory in the world,
including the Cavendish.

3.5 The corpuscle: notes from a ‘discovery’

The folk history of science stresses crucial experiments, moments of

revelation, great achievements by geniuses, and the like. Real scientific life is
74 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

far more nuanced and therefore more interesting. The ‘discovery’ of the elec-
tron is no exception and, as Arabatzis argued, the very ‘notion of the “discovery
of the electron” has become a problem demanding explanation, as opposed to
an explanatory resource’ (Arabatzis, 2006, p. 69), in spite of the oft-repeated
‘fact’ that gives us a name, a date and a place: J. J. Thomson, in 1897, at the
Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In this section and the next, we shall look
at the infancy of the electron chez Thomson, with only essential references to
other participants in the birth of what we know as the first elementary particle.
This story-line does, however, actually start with one of those few episodes in
science that do have a straightforward name-date-and-place tag attached to it:
the discovery of Roentgen rays.
In December 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen, a Professor of Physics in Würzburg,
Germany, showed evidence of a new kind of radiation that, among many other
unexpected properties, could produce images of the bones in a hand and of
a compass needle inside an iron box. The famous picture of his own hand,
ring included, triggered an immediate reaction in much of the scientific world
(Pais, 1986, pp. 35–42). Cambridge was no stranger to this general response
and J. J. Thomson managed to capitalize on his long experience with tubes
and vacuum pumps to immediately work on X-rays and, indirectly, on cathode
rays, since X-rays were obtained from cathode-ray tubes. J. J. described the gen-
eral excitement over X-rays in the following terms in a paper in the February
1896 issue of Nature:

The discovery of Prof. Röntgen of the rays which bear his name has
aroused an interest perhaps unparalleled in the history of physical
science. Reports of experiments on these rays come daily from
laboratories in almost every part of the civilised world. A large part
of these relate to the methods of producing Röntgen photographs,
and the application of the ‘new photography’ to medical and other
purposes. A considerable amount of work has, however, been done on
the physical properties of these rays (Thomson, 1896a, p. 391).

In that same paper, published only two months after the first announcement
of X-rays, he could already refer to experiments performed at the Cavendish on
different aspects of Roentgen rays by himself, McClelland, C. J. R (sic) Wilson
and Erskine Murray. In his presidential address to the British Association
for the Advancement of Science in 1909, J. J. vividly compared the discovery
of X-rays to that of ‘the discovery of gold in a sparsely populated country;
it attracts workers who come in the first place for the gold, but who may
find that the country has other products, other charms, perhaps even more
valuable than gold itself’. One of the side effects of this gold rush was the
 3.5 The corpuscle: notes from a ‘discovery’ 75

attraction of many workers to that which had been his research topic, the pas-
sage of electricity through gases. And this was the shift that started Thomson
on the path towards the corpuscle: ‘The study of gases exposed to Röntgen rays
has revealed in such gases the presence of particles charged with electricity’
(Thomson, 1909a, p. 10).
Thomson had hitherto performed only one experiment on cathode rays,
consisting of a one-off study of their velocity. Unlike Arthur Schuster, whose
work focused on the nature and behaviour of cathode rays, Thomson had sel-
dom paid attention to this phenomenon. Despite having long investigated the
nature of discharge in tubes, he encountered few manifestations of the pres-
ence of cathode rays, probably because he normally worked at higher pressures
than Schuster (Falconer, 1985, p. 152). But, in 1894, he decided to analyse the
speed of cathode rays in order to challenge experiments recently published by
Hertz and his student Lenard, which seemed to show that cathode rays could
pass through thin metal films and, therefore, that cathode rays were ethereal
waves. Actually, as early as 1883, Hertz had studied the possible effects of elec-
tric fields on cathode rays, finding no deviation of the rays, which convinced
him that the rays were some kind of undulatory phenomenon (Hertz, 1883).
Had they been particles, they would have been deflected by the electric fields.
Although these experiments were far from conclusive, they used to be cited by
Continental physicists as an argument for the undulatory nature of cathode
rays. As we shall see later, J. J. Thomson repeated these experiments only in
1897, proving that cathode rays were actually deflected and that Hertz’s results
were due to secondary effects.
But let us go back to 1894. In his studies on electrical conduction in gases,
Thomson had paid much attention to the speed of discharge in tubes, a mag-
nitude that was crucial to his modelling of a theoretical mechanism for dis-
charge. That is why he was in a good position to undertake similar experiments
with cathode rays, and to compare the new results with those previously gath-
ered by other people. The velocity he obtained in 1894 was ‘small compared
with that with which the main discharge from the positive to the negative
electrode travels between the electrodes’, and he concluded that ‘the velocity
of the cathode-rays … agrees very nearly with the velocity which a negatively
electrified atom of hydrogen would acquire under the influence of the poten-
tial fall which occurs at the cathode’ (Thomson, 1894c, p. 364). Thus, his meas-
urements on the speed of cathode rays were consistent with the traditional
British understanding that they were corpuscular. For the wave explanation
to be correct, cathode rays had to move at a speed close to that of light. This
episode has often been quoted as evidence for Thomson’s long engagement
with a purported dispute between British and Continental physicists about the
76 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

nature of cathode rays. But as Falconer convincingly showed, there was no such
long-term warfare: Schuster was the only British physicist really interested in
cathode rays before 1896, and other British physicists, Thomson included, paid
scant attention to this phenomenon (Falconer, 1987).
Just like Thomson, Roentgen also tried to replicate Hertz and Lenard’s exper-
iments. He closely followed the latter’s experimental set-up, except for one tiny
detail. While Lenard had covered the cathode-ray tube with a thick coating so
that cathode rays could only leave the tube through a tiny hole, Roentgen used
only a thin sheet of black cardboard to stop the cathode rays. As it turned out,
however, this shield was not enough to prevent some radiation from produ-
cing fluorescence on a photographic screen. In less than two months, Roentgen
had studied the basic properties of this new radiation, or X-rays, presenting his
results to the local Society for Physics and Medicine in Würzburg at the end of
December, 1895. By the second week of January, 1896, the whole world had
seen the spectacular pictures produced with Roentgen’s rays in newspapers
and magazines, and a number of physicists had started to work on the new
radiation.
Thus, 1895 pumped new blood, new ideas and new resources into J. J.’s
research programme on the conduction of electricity through gases. By the end
of 1896, he had managed to develop a new theory of gaseous conduction based
on results from his work on and with X-rays and on suggestions and help pro-
vided by his new research students, especially McClelland and Rutherford, with
whom he also co-authored research papers in 1896 (Thomson & McClelland,
1896; Thomson & Rutherford, 1896). Questions about the origin, nature and
properties of X-rays were all open.
Thomson soon found that X-rays ionized gases that would otherwise be
non-conductors, which in turn was evidence for the high energy (higher than
ordinary light) of such rays (Thomson, 1896b). This was important for three
reasons: first, because it probably triggered in him the idea that, just as ordin-
ary light was emitted by the vibration of the molecules of an element, X-rays
might equally be the result of vibrations of ‘finer pieces’ of the gas molecules
(Falconer, 1987, p. 265); second, because X-rays seemed to cause a dissociation
similar to the one he imagined for electrification in gases: ‘The passage of these
rays through a substance seems thus to be accompanied by a splitting up of
its molecules, which enables electricity to pass through it by a process resem-
bling that by which a current passes through an electrolyte’ (Thomson, 1896b,
p. 276); and third, because it provided a method to quantitatively measure the
intensity of X-rays or the conductivity of a gas: the rate at which a charged plate
emitted electricity after being radiated with X-rays was proportional to their
intensity.
 3.5 The corpuscle: notes from a ‘discovery’ 77

Since ‘Röntgenised’ gases showed unexpected conductivity (Thomson, 1896c,

p. 704), it was only natural that J. J., assisted this time by Rutherford, would
undertake similar experimental studies to the ones he had done for over a dec-
ade, this time using X-rays, in order to get new ideas for building a definitive
theory of electric conduction in gases. The radical novelty was that Thomson
and Rutherford managed to put forward a quantitative theory of conduction, as
opposed to the only qualitative suggestions of previous theories. With this, they
could calculate, for instance, the number of particles into which the molecules
of a gas would dissociate or the rate at which a ‘Röntgenised’ gas would leak
(i.e., would cease to be a conductor). Following Thomson’s understanding of
the passage of electricity through gases as involving electrified particles, and
with the new quantitative methods, Rutherford and Thomson inferred that
‘the charged particles in the gas exposed to the Röntgen rays are the centres
of an aggregation of a considerable number of [neutral] molecules’ (Thomson
& Rutherford, 1896, p. 402). In other words, Thomson thought that conduc-
tion was due to the movement of aggregations, the size of which seemed to be
much larger than the ordinary structure of the gas molecules.
The most-articulated picture of Thomson’s views around the autumn of 1896
can be found in a series of lectures he delivered in September at the University
of Princeton, to which he was invited in the context of its 150th anniversary. It
was his first trip to America, where he travelled in the company of his wife, and
visited Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, before going to Princeton, the
American university ‘most reminiscent of Cambridge’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 171).
These lectures were published as a book in 1898 but, by that time, a lot had
changed and Thomson had thoroughly revised the text. In the original manu-
script, we find that J. J. Thomson greatly believed in his recent steps towards
an explanation of electricity in gases through molecular aggregations, even if
this meant a break with common explanations of electrolysis (where the carri-
ers of electricity were obviously ions of atomic size). But, in hindsight, one can
also feel huge tensions of physics in the making: we find constant references
to experiments under way in the Cavendish and elsewhere, and the lack of a
total and coherent theory of conductivity. As we have seen in the previous two
paragraphs, he had reasons to think of structural units smaller than atoms to
account for the origin of Roentgen rays, and for molecular aggregates larger
than normal atoms to explain conduction in gases.
His next step, and one that would have unexpected consequences, was to
see if this new theory of electric currents in gases was also valid, as he had
hoped, for cathode rays, thinking that they might also be aggregates of mol-
ecules around a charged atom and, therefore, bigger than atoms. This hypoth-
esis clashed, of course, with Hertz and Lenard’s results, which he had tried to
78 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

undermine two years earlier. And that is how, at the end of 1896, he started
work on a topic to which, so far, he had paid scant attention. He also felt that
the need to better understand the origins and nature of Roentgen rays made
clarification on the nature of cathode rays urgent. Thus, contrary to traditional
accounts of Thomson’s supposed long interest on cathode rays, ‘the discovery
of X-rays did not divert attention from the cathode ray controversy, it virtu-
ally created it’ (Falconer, 1987, p. 249; see also Turpin, 1980). J. J. Thomson,
however, is partly responsible for the traditional history: his experiments on
cathode rays were presented at a public event, the Friday Meetings of the Royal
Institution, and J. J. justified his interest in the topic based on a supposed con-
troversy between Continental and British accounts of cathode rays, with X-rays
only as the catalyst for a renewed interest in them.
Following similar experiments by Jean Perrin some months earlier,
Thomson’s first goal was to verify that the negative electricity was actually
carried by the cathode rays and not some secondary effect. This was important
if he was to apply his dissociation theory of conduction to cathode rays. He
soon also proved that the rays experienced magnetic deflection and that this
was independent of the medium they traversed, which further supported their
corpuscular nature. These two results, which were not particularly revealing
or exciting, were presented to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in early
February 1897 (Thomson, 1897a). The real change came in his Royal Institution
Friday Meeting of 30 April, where he presented his first measurement of the
charge-to-mass ratio for the carriers of cathode rays and speculated, for the first
time, on the existence of corpuscles of very small mass. Most of that paper is
a long and detailed explanation of his and Lenard’s experiments on cathode
rays proving their magnetic deflection and their identity as carriers of nega-
tive electricity. Hertz’s old contention that cathode rays could not be deflected
by electric fields and, therefore, could not be particles, was still rejected on
the basis of arguments, not experiments; and Lenard’s theory that cathode
rays could traverse matter in ways that no known atom or molecule could still
awaited explanation. The latter, together with the information from his own
experiments, triggered the question he addressed in the last pages of the paper:
‘These numbers raise a question … and this is the size of the carriers of the
electric charge. Are they or are they not the dimensions of ordinary matter?’
(Thomson, 1897b, p. 12). To which he famously gave the following answer:

Thus, from Lenard’s experiments on the absorption of the rays

outside the tube, it follows on the hypothesis that the cathode rays
are charged particles moving with high velocities, that the size
of the carriers must be small compared with the dimensions of
 3.5 The corpuscle: notes from a ‘discovery’ 79

ordinary atoms or molecules. The assumption of a state of matter

more finely subdivided than the atom of an element is a somewhat
startling one; but a hypothesis that would involve somewhat similar
consequences – viz. that the so-called elements are compounds
of some primordial element – has been put forward from time to
time by various chemists. Thus, Prout believed that the atoms of all
the elements were built up of atoms of hydrogen, and Mr. Norman
Lockyer has advanced weighty arguments, founded on spectroscopic
consideration, in favour of the composite nature of the elements
(Thomson, 1897b, p. 13).

The reference to the chemists Prout and Lockyer should not be overlooked. The
possibility of some structure inside the atom accounting for chemical and elec-
trical phenomena was not new to Thomson. He had toyed with the idea in his
vortex ring theory and again in the theories of electric discharge. His reference
to chemistry and spectroscopy, both part of his grand notion of the Physical
Sciences, can be read as his need for external support for his suggestion. But it
can also be interpreted as a typical attitude in J. J., who was always thinking
in terms of big pictures. As it often happened with him, his suggestion of a
tiny, subatomic corpuscle was immediately integrated into a major framework.
His tendency towards overarching theories that explained more than just one
phenomenon led him, on this occasion, to immediately extend his corpuscle
hypothesis into other areas.
At the same time, one should not be overawed, magnifying J. J.’s 1897 sug-
gestion into some sort of prophetic insight. We have already seen him put
forward a number of loosely defined models and visual images with partial
explanatory power. At this point, the jump from an explanation of cathode rays
to an all-encompassing theory of matter seems to follow the same pattern. If
we look at his wording, his supposition was that ‘the atoms of the elements are
aggregations of very small particles, all similar to each other; we shall call such
particles corpuscles, so that the atoms of the ordinary elements are made up of
corpuscles and holes, the holes being predominant’ (Thomson, 1897b, p. 13). A
theory of matter based on corpuscles would include, as well, these predominant
holes about which nothing else was said.
Finally, his first estimation of the charge-to-mass ratio, which in turn would
give an indirect estimate of the mass of the corpuscles, was based on two meas-
urements. First, from the experiments on magnetic deflection, a relationship
between the mass, the charge and the speed of the particles could be deter-
mined; and second, measuring the increase in heat of a given material under
the impact of cathode rays, he also obtained a relationship between the three
80 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

magnitudes. Cancelling out the speed of the rays, he obtained a value of the
mass-to-charge ratio of 1·6 ×10–7:

This is very small compared with the value 10–4 for the ratio of the
mass of an atom of hydrogen to the charge carried by it. If the result
stood by itself we might think that it was probable that e was greater
than the atomic charge of atom rather than that m was less than the
mass of the hydrogen atom. Taken, however, in conjunction with
Lenard’s results for the absorption of the cathode rays, these numbers
seem to favour the hypothesis that the carriers of the charges are
smaller than the atoms of hydrogen (Thomson, 1897b, p. 14).

The third, and most frequently quoted paper of J. J. Thomson in 1897 was writ-
ten in August and published in the October issue of the Philosophical Magazine.
By now, he had deconstructed Hertz’s experiment and proven that cathode
rays were actually deflected by electric fields, final proof of their corpuscular
nature. This, in turn, provided him with an alternative method for estimating
the mass-to-charge ratio, obtaining a value of the same order of magnitude as
the one previously obtained. This emboldened him to speculate not only on the
nature of cathode rays but also on their role as universal constituents of matter,
as well as suggesting his first tentative model of matter based on corpuscles.
In the face of all the facts, he again used the authority of chemists and spec-
troscopists (basically Prout and Lockyer) to support his thesis that ‘the atoms
of the different chemical elements are different aggregations of atoms of the
same kind’, and he stated, with more emphasis than in April, that ‘in the very
intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode the molecules of the
gas are dissociated and split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into
these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles’ (Thomson,
1897c, p. 311).
The sentence highlights the fact that J. J.’s theory of corpuscles was continu-
ation of his previous theories of electric discharge. Corpuscles were obtained
as the outcome in the dissociation process that, according to his theory, took
place in gaseous electric conduction, but in a way he had so far not foreseen:
that all gases would decompose into the same fundamental units and not into
chemically distinct ions:

Thus on this view we have in the cathode rays matter in a new

state, a state in which the subdivision of matter is carried very
much further than in the ordinary gaseous state: a state in which
all matter – that is, matter derived from different sources such as
hydrogen, oxygen, &c. – is of one and the same kind; this matter
 3.6 Corpuscles and electrons 81

being the substance from which all the chemical elements are built
up (Thomson, 1897c, p. 312).

To avoid anachronism, we should not yet regard this 1897 corpuscle as the first
elementary particle within a longer list to come. J. J. saw corpuscles as a new
state of matter, as yet undefined, obtainable from all atoms and molecules and,
therefore, being a subdivision of the chemical atom rather than a component of
it. Furthermore, both the nature of matter and of charge and their mutual rela-
tions were ill defined. One possibility he briefly discussed was that the charge-
to-mass relationship might be of the kind he considered in his 1881 paper, and
later in his 1893 book, i.e., that the mass of the carriers of electricity in cathode
rays was the ‘quasi mass which a charged body possesses in virtue of the elec-
tric field set up in its neighbourhood’ (Thomson, 1897c, p. 310). Furthermore,
as we shall later see, the presence of corpuscles was not incompatible with, or
a challenge to, his theory of Faraday tubes in the ether.
If in April he had speculated on atoms made out of corpuscles and ‘holes’,
in this later paper, he put forward a more sophisticated idea of the atom, one
in which atoms would be composed of these ‘primordial atoms’ arranged in
electromagnetically stable configurations. He did not have a law for the forces
between corpuscles, noting that there could be many theoretical models for
such forces; but, true to his speculative tendency, he imagined that corpuscles
in the atom might have similar arrangements to the stable configurations dis-
played by floating magnets: ‘in this model the magnets arrange themselves in
equilibrium under their mutual repulsions and a central attraction caused by
the pole of a large magnet placed above the floating magnets’ (Thomson, 1897c,
p. 313). Like in 1881, when he studied the stability of certain configurations of
vortex rings, these magnets also showed concentric stable arrangements of up
to five elements, which ‘seems to me to be suggestive in relation to the peri-
odic law’.

3.6 Corpuscles and electrons

J. J. Thomson received the Nobel Prize in 1906 not for discovering

the electron but for his long work on the conduction of electricity in gases.
For some, this is an unfair decision: if he discovered the electron, why should
he not be given the highest scientific honour for his longest-lasting contribu-
tion to science, i.e., for his discovery of the electron? The easy way to answer
such a question is cite the problem the Nobel commission had in establishing
the paternity of the electron, since Thomson was only one of many parents,
including, at least, Pieter Zeeman, Walter Kaufmann, and Emil Wiechert. The
82 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

commission had to give Thomson the prize, but could not take sides in prior-
ity disputes: that is why – the story goes – he was nominally awarded the Prize
for something else. This is a very anachronistic interpretation, since it empha-
sizes what is important now for us and not what was important for the par-
ticipants themselves at that time (1897 and 1906). As a matter of fact, in 1897,
J. J. Thomson himself did not give priority to his supposed discovery of the first
elementary particle, but continued working on a theory of electric discharge. At
that time, the corpuscle hypothesis was, rather than a new theory of matter, a
new and very important step towards a full theory of electric discharge, as his
publications in the period 1898–1900 show. Only after he had finally solved the
puzzle of electric discharge, around 1900, did he turn his attention to the cor-
puscle as the basic unit of matter. The corpuscle thus entered Thomson’s world as
the first (and, at the time, only) elementary particle only with the new century.
By that time, he had also obtained independent evidence of the charge-to-
mass ratio of the corpuscles and for the inevitable conclusion that its value was
necessarily due to the small mass of the corpuscles (and not to a possible larger
charge of the negative ions). In fact, there was more speculation than heroic
histories usually allow for in his 1897 corpuscles. To start with, he did not have
convincing experimental evidence that the high charge-to-mass ratio of cath-
ode rays was necessarily due to the smallness of the mass of the particles. Nor
did he have evidence to suggest that corpuscles were universal constituents of
matter. Both are, yet again, examples of Thomson’s strong tendency to specu-
late based only on inconclusive results and a great deal of imagination. Only
in the years between 1897 and 1900 were enough independent experimental
results gathered to ground and confirm Thomson’s corpuscle hypothesis.
Two papers from 1899 and 1900, and his 1903 book Conduction of Electricity
through Gases, are the culmination of his theorising about electric conduction
in gases. In these few years, J. J. Thomson relied heavily on the work of many
of his research students, and, contrary to his previous practice, he now men-
tioned them explicitly in his papers. Thus, in his 1899 paper ‘On the theory
of the conduction of electricity through gases by charged ions’, J. J. directly
referred to the work of Rutherford and John Zeleny on the conductivity of gases
under the radiation of Roentgen rays, to Rutherford’s similar experiments on
gases irradiated by uranium rays, to the changes of conductivity in a gas under
the influence of a flame by McClelland and H. A. Wilson or under the influence
of incandescent metals or of an arc discharge also by McClelland. All these
investigations gave important information on the speed at which ions in a con-
ducting gas moved, thus reinforcing, among other things, the asymmetry of
such speeds for positive and negative electrification.
 3.6 Corpuscles and electrons 83

Contrary to the theory that had prevailed in the years prior to 1897, a dis-
charge mechanism based on the movement and dissociation of ions could
now explain such asymmetry, considering corpuscles as ‘one of the small ions
which are found in the cathode rays, and which we have reason to believe play
an important part in all cases of electric discharge’ (Thomson, 1900, p. 281).
The much simpler mechanism he now put forward was

that the ionization in the ordinary cases of discharge through

gases is produced by the motion through the gas of ions or corpuscles
already present in the gas, these ions or corpuscles under the action
of the electric field acquire velocity and kinetic energy; and when
this velocity or energy reaches a definite value which need not be
the same for the positive and negative ion, these ions or corpuscles
are able, by their collision with the surrounding molecules, to
produce other ions or corpuscles. This dissociation may be directly due
to the collision, or indirectly to rays like Röntgen rays produced by
the collision (Thomson, 1900, pp. 279–80, my emphasis).

The free paths of the ions (positive) and corpuscles (negative) would be differ-
ent due to their different masses, thus explaining the asymmetry in the dis-
charge that had troubled him and many other researchers for such a long time.
The corpuscle was finally the basic tool for the long-awaited mechanism of the
transfer of electricity.
That electric discharge in gases was the apple of Thomson’s eye is also clear
in his 1903 book Conduction of Electricity through Gases, an encyclopaedic com-
pendium of all knowledge available on the field, interpreted now in terms of
the corpuscle theory. The book saw a second, largely revised, edition in 1906,
and a third two-volume edition in 1928 and 1933. As with Recent Researches,
Conduction of Electricity emphasized that ‘the study of the electrical properties
of gases seems to offer the most promising field for investigating the Nature
of Electricity and the Constitution of Matter’ (Thomson, 1903a, prologue to
the first edition), a promising field he proudly located in the Cavendish, in the
lectures and research he and his assistants were conducting. The whole book
had two basic goals: one was to ‘develope [sic] the view that the conduction
of electricity through gases is due to the presence in the gas of small parti-
cles charged with electricity, called ions, which under the influence of electric
forces move from one part of the gas to another’, and the second to show that
there was a strong asymmetry between positive and negative electrification
and that this was fully explained by the existence of the negatively charged
corpuscles. Corpuscles became, thus, the key to all electric phenomena, in a
84 The ether and the corpuscle: from waves to particles

theory that, in his words, ‘in many respects closely resembles that of the old
“One Fluid Theory of Electricity”:

The ‘electric fluid’ corresponds to an assemblage of corpuscles,

negative electrification consisting of a collection of these corpuscles:
the transference of electrification from place to place being a
movement of corpuscles from the place where there is a gain of
positive electrification to the place where there is a gain of negative.
Thus a positively electrified body is one which has been deprived
of some corpuscles. These corpuscles may either remain free or get
attached to molecules of matter with which they come in contact;
thus positive electrification is always associated with ordinary matter,
while negative electrification may or may not be, according as the
corpuscles are or are not attached to molecules of ordinary matter
(Thomson, 1903a, p. 63).

Note here a theme that will occupy us in the next chapter and the last: the
distinction between ‘ordinary’ matter and the mass of corpuscles brings us to
the two interconnected questions, ‘What is electricity?’ and ‘What is matter?’
Following the Maxwellian tradition, electric charge was a boundary phenom-
enon between ether and matter. Corpuscles were the carriers of negative elec-
tricity and the agents (by their excess or their deficiency) of all electrification
in ordinary matter. But the way corpuscles were themselves electrified was,
at this early stage, unclear. The hypothesis of the mass of corpuscles coming
from their own electrification, which he had suggested in the 1897 Philosophical
Magazine paper, and the relationship of such mass with the arrangement of
ethereal Faraday tubes were still to be developed further.
In all his accounts, at least until 1911, Thomson used the word ‘corpuscle’
to refer to his massive carrier of negative electricity. ‘Electron’ had been used
among physicists as a synonym of ‘elementary quantity of electricity’ since 1891,
when George Johnstone Stoney had suggested the term at the Belfast meeting
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The term was new,
but not the idea: phenomena like electrolysis had long given evidence of a
quantization of electricity, and Wilhelm Weber, perhaps the most influential
authority on electricity the Continent, had toyed with the idea of small parti-
cles of unit electricity (Arabatzis, 2006, pp. 70–4). Towards the end of the cen-
tury, the term had acquired in Cambridge a very particular meaning: in his search
to formulate a final theory of electricity and matter, Joseph Larmor, whom we
met beating Thomson as first wrangler, and was a lecturer in mathematics in
Cambridge, had appropriated the term to denote mathematical singularities
in the ether (Warwick, 2003b). Like Thomson and many other Maxwellians,
 3.6 Corpuscles and electrons 85

Larmor longed for a theory that explained the relationship between ether and
matter; unlike Thomson, however, Larmor’s career kept him away from labora-
tories and he did not realize the importance of chemistry in the pursuit of such
a theory. Whereas Thomson’s corpuscles were basically material units that car-
ried the elementary charge of electricity, Larmor’s singularities (or monads) in
the ether were the actual electric charge. In the former, the main characteristic
was the mass of the particle and the charge was left unexplained, while it was
the other way around in the latter. In a way, one could say that Thomson was
more faithful to Maxwell’s legacy than Larmor, by sticking to a continuous elec-
tromagnetic ether without singularities. In other words, J. J.’s corpuscles had a
mass and a charge that were, in unexplained ways, epiphenomena of the ether;
while Larmor’s electrons had introduced a new entity different from the ether
or, perhaps more clearly, a new kind of structured ether.
Larmor’s electrons were, like in the similar theoretical construction of the
Dutchman H. A. Lorentz, inevitably identified with the smallest charged par-
ticle available at the moment, the ion of hydrogen (Darrigol, 1994). The first
and very influential identification between Larmor’s monads and J. J.’s cor-
puscles came in a paper written by George FitzGerald in the same issue of
the Electrician where Thomson’s April 1897 Evening Meeting was published.
With this, FitzGerald’s became the first authorized commentary of J. J.’s early
hypothesis, one with which Thomson certainly did not agree. One of its most
important characteristics, albeit still rather speculative in April 1897, was that
the corpuscles were universal components of all matter, which FitzGerald
thought could set Thomson ‘within measurable distance of the dreams of the
alchemists, and are in presence of a method of transmuting one substance into
another’ (FitzGerald, 1897, p. 104). But J. J. had not yet discussed in what way
the corpuscles were actually the building blocks of matter, a question that was
intimately related to the relationship between corpuscles, their electrification,
and the ether.
 4

On creeds and policies:

the corpuscular theory of matter

4.1 What is an atom like?

Atoms; or is it molecules? The semantic fields of these terms were

rather confused in the nineteenth century. In many instances, these two words
were used almost synonymously but, more often than not, there was a lack of
consistency in their usage, not only when comparing different research tradi-
tions, but also in their use by individuals. We have already found J. J. Thomson,
for instance, in his discussion of the vortex ring theory, using the two terms
equivocally. There are many historical reasons for this confusion, but two are
particularly relevant here. First, in the nineteenth century, there were many
theories of matter evolving in different intellectual arenas, especially one com-
ing from the Newtonian and Laplacean tradition of physics, and another from
the new chemistry of Lavoisier, two traditions that were miles apart in meth-
ods, conceptual formulation, and philosophical background. Second, the term
‘atom’ had a longer philosophical history than ‘molecule’, having acquired a
sort of inertia that made it more difficult for the former to lose its malleability
and acquire a more specific, well-defined ‘scientific’ meaning.
Maxwell gives us a good example of this confusion, with his two oft-quoted
popular papers on the subject: the first, a general address to the British
Association in Bradford in 1873, and his 1875 article for the ninth edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The two papers are very similar, but the first
is entitled ‘Molecules’ and the second ‘Atom’. And his attempts to clarify the
terminology are not always totally clear. Thus, for instance, he explains that
by molecule he means the minimal unit of a particular chemical substance,
either simple or compound, while atom ‘is a body which cannot be cut in two’,
and ‘if there is such a thing, must be a molecule of an elementary substance’

86
 4.1 What is an atom like? 87

(Maxwell, 1874, p. 363). The two texts were meant for audiences not neces-
sarily convinced about the reality of atoms, either because an indivisible unit
of matter was a priori impossible, or because such small entities were not
observable. With this in mind, he organised the papers so as to argue for
the validity of atoms and/or molecules as hypotheses useful in many areas of
physics and chemistry.
Maxwell’s timeline of the modern atomic theory in those papers starts with
the usual initial event: Dalton’s revival and redefinition of the atomistic con-
stitution of matter that had somehow been one of the fundamental tenets of
early modern and Newtonian natural philosophy. Famously, Newton thought
that ‘It seems probable …, that God in the Beginning form’d matter in solid,
massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and in such
Proportion to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form’d them’
(Newton, 1730, p. 400). But it was with Dalton’s law of chemical proportions
that such atoms became entities indirectly measurable in the laboratory. The
sizes and properties of such atoms were characteristic of each chemical elem-
ent and, naturally, irreducible to each other. There were as many (and only as
many) kinds of atoms as chemical elements one could isolate in the laboratory.
Later, the Scot Thomas Thomson, one of the most influential British natural
philosophers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was instrumental in
spreading Dalton’s atomistic ideas. He was also a strong supporter of William
Prout’s idea that the masses of all atoms were exact multiples of the mass of
the hydrogen atom and that, as a result, all atoms should be somehow com-
posed of aggregations of that simplest atom or protyle. This suggestion was
influential in Britain in the first third of the century, but further measure-
ments proved it untenable (Nye, 1996).
Different kinds of atoms with different properties could have involved, in
principle, the possibility of imagining them with different shapes, sizes or
structures, giving them more realistic representations beyond the purely sym-
bolic notation that alchemists had long used to denote the properties of the
elements. But that did not happen, at least not to any significant extent, since
the very existence of atoms was the main point of contention: talk of ‘atoms’
was basically a useful tool, as much as talk of ‘chemical equivalents’ or ‘affin-
ities’. And, as a matter of fact, the initial impetus for the atomic theory à la
Dalton weakened with the growth of positivistic philosophy. In the words of
Mary Jo Nye, ‘from roughly 1840 to 1900, often in the name of creating a less
hypothetical, more ‘positive’ science, the language of ‘atoms’ often came under
fire and the language of ‘equivalents’ was in vogue, both in Great Britain and
on the Continent, especially in France’ (Nye, 1996, p. 44). Another point worth
mentioning is that Dalton’s theory had started as a way of unifying the more
88 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

physical Newtonian tradition and the more chemical approach of Lavoisier and
other – mostly French – natural philosophers. By the middle of the century,
however, the two communities were, generally speaking, moving apart from
each other. In Chapter 2, emphasis was placed on J. J. Thomson’s institutional
attempt to prevent such increasing separation, an aspect that will surface again
in the next chapter with his support for the appropriation of the electron by
the chemists.
To further complicate the possible emergence of a consistent atomistic
science, we should also think of the increasing importance of kinetic theory
in the nineteenth century. The work of Rudolf Claussius, in Zürich, and others
had proven that heat could be statistically explained in terms of atomic move-
ments. This was a new development of the Newtonian project that tried to
explain everything in terms of components and their interactions. Rather than
looking for new ethers, new fluids, and hidden properties, the kinetic the-
ory promised to consummate a certain physical reductionism. But, unlike the
chemical atom, Claussius’ atoms were all the same, in the style of Newton and
Laplace’s scheme of things. Here, Maxwell is also central. With his mathemat-
ical savoir-faire, he could further develop the principles on which Claussius had
built his heat theory and set the foundations for an overarching molecular the-
ory of matter. In the lecture ‘Molecules’, Maxwell summarized the principles
on which the atomic theory of heat was founded: the assumption that all mat-
ter is atomic, and that ‘the molecules of all bodies are in motion, even when
the body itself appears to be at rest’ (Maxwell, 1874, p. 364). From the motions
and mutual interactions of these ‘molecules’, and with their macroscopic phys-
ical constraints, one could quantitatively deduce some of the properties of the
given body like pressure, temperature, specific heat, diffusion, thermodynamic
equilibrium of mixtures, etc.
The development of statistical mechanics in the last third of the century,
however, resulted in a further separation between the atoms of the chemists
and of the physicists. The latter were imaginary, mathematical points with only
mechanical properties. In Maxwell’s words, there is ‘no assumption with respect
to the nature of the small parts – whether they are all of one magnitude. We do
not even assume them to have extension and figure’ (Maxwell, 1875, p. 451). His
atoms were indistinguishable, as opposed to the ones used by the chemists: ‘A
molecule is that minute portion of a substance which moves about as a whole,
so that its parts, if it has any, do not part company during the motion of agita-
tion of the gas. The result of the kinetic theory, therefore, is to give us informa-
tion about the relative masses of molecules considered as moving bodies’ (p.
456). Atoms of hydrogen and of gold, for instance, were, for statistical purposes,
basically the same. And, as a consequence, the atom of the kinetic theory did
 4.1 What is an atom like? 89

not ask for an internal structure of any kind. It was actually the ultimate unit
from which to obtain other properties rather than an entity with properties.
Anti-atomism also arose from the problems that rigid atoms posed in
explaining things that needed an internal structure for the atoms or, at least,
diverse kinds of atoms: ‘With such a structured atom, one could better under-
stand the energy relations of chemical reactions; the indivisibility of Dalton’s
atoms severely strained Berthelot’s credulity’ (Nye, 1972, p. 9). Defendants of
chemical atomism thus had to devise models of molecular structure in order
to account, for instance, for the bonding and the behaviour of chemical sub-
stances. This became particularly important with the increasing development
of organic chemistry and, especially, with the problems of isomerism. Thus, the
atom of the chemist and the atom of the physicist seemed to follow divergent
paths, which was, in turn, a challenge to any realist interpretation. Going back
to Maxwell’s lectures, ‘If we suppose that the molecules known to us are built
up each of some moderate number of atoms, these atoms being all of them
exactly alike, then we may attribute the limited number of molecular species
to the limited number of ways in which the primitive atoms may be combined
so as to form a permanent system’ (Maxwell, 1875, p. 480). But, he concluded,
so far, nobody seemed to have a way to picture that.
There was, in fact, one such visual technique, although it was not universally
accepted. There was a trend among British chemists to construct simple gadg-
ets, for demonstration purposes only, to symbolize the molecular structure.
Sets of balls with different colours representing different types of atoms, and
sticks with which to attach these balls to act as the bond between them, were
used in the classroom and in amateur lectures, and were even commercialized
as toys for children. Of course, such devices were ridiculed by anti-atomists
and regarded with deep reservation by many atomists, but this did not prevent
their inclusion in some lecture rooms. They were particularly popular during
the 1870s in Owens College, where J. J. received his first scientific training.
There, Frankland and Schorlemmer used them regularly as a way to introduce
students to the complexities of organic chemistry (Meinel, 2009). Certainly,
there is no necessary connection, at least not one that can be documented,
between these early molecular representations and J. J.’s later models of the
atom, but it helps us to understand the broad British tradition of reasoning
through images, a tradition in which Thomson received his early education
and of which he became a paradigmatic instance.
Maxwell’s lectures introduce us to another element that was beginning to
provide information about the internal properties of atoms/molecules: spec-
troscopy. ‘The molecule, though indestructible, is not a hard rigid body, but is
capable of internal movements, and when these are excited, it emits rays, the
90 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

wave-length of which is a measure of the time of vibration in the molecule’

(Maxwell, 1874, p. 374). Each type of molecule had its own signature in the
form of emitted radiation, irrespective of the history of the specific molecule.
And that was, according to him, what set the nature of atoms outside the
scope of evolution and, to a certain degree, even outside the scope of science:
‘No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of mol-
ecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule
is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction’, from which
he inferred the manufactured nature of all molecules. And if molecules were
manufactured through processes other than those ‘we call natural’, there was
not much science could do to explain their origins. ‘Thus we have led, along a
strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which Science must stop’ (p.
376). Beyond the obvious theological implications of this line of thought, there
was an epistemological thread that prevented him from trying to imagine the
internal structure of the atoms that form molecules: it is the molecules, and
not atoms in isolation, which perhaps do not even exist, that we can study and
imagine.
Not everyone thought this put an end to speculation about a possible internal
structure of atoms. Also in 1873, the polemic Norman Lockyer brought for-
ward his hypothesis of what he called ‘celestial dissociation’ to explain certain
regularities in the solar spectrum (Lockyer, 1874, p. 493). His observations led
him to assert that the spectra of chemical elements were dependent on tem-
perature and that cosmic very high temperatures might dissociate atoms into
supposed components in the same way laboratory high temperatures dissoci-
ated compound substances into their simple elements. As happened with many
of his earlier hypothesis, this new theory of Lockyer’s was also surrounded
by controversy. Having received no professional training in science, and being
well known for his often inaccurate chemical work in the laboratory, Lockyer’s
results were easily refuted and his general theories consequently dismissed. His
dissociation hypothesis, dismissed by the Cambridge Professors of Chemistry,
Liveing and Dewar, was no exception.
From this point of view, it is difficult to understand why Thomson chose to
mention Lockyer’s theory as support for his ‘corpuscle’ hypothesis in 1897. It
might well be that, used as he was to building models without much ontological
commitment to them, any support available for his corpuscle was welcome. Or
we could think that, since the 1897 corpuscle was basically an instrument to
explain the conduction of electricity in gases, and only indirectly a universal
component of matter, the association he drew with the much-criticized theory
of Lockyer reflects his being not yet totally committed to the latter aspect of
the corpuscle. In any case, and with the background provided in this section,
 4.2 A world of electrons 91

we can now try to explore J. J.’s path to the formulation of a theory of matter
based on his corpuscles.

4.2 A world of electrons

Following John Heilbron, it is often repeated that ‘the theory of atomic

structure came into being with the discovery of the electron in 1897’ (Heilbron,
1981, p. 14). That is only partly true, since J. J. Thomson’s corpuscle was, in the
first instance, a tool to explain the behaviour of cathode rays, and only later
became the agent in a general theory of conduction of electricity. Only indir-
ectly did it turn into the building block of matter: his corpuscular theory of
electricity included a subatomic division into material carriers of electricity
and, therefore, a theory of atomic composition. Once electricity was explained
in terms of corpuscles, J. J. could look into the internal composition of atoms.
At this stage, it does not surprise us that, following his monistic philosophy
of nature, once he had corpuscles as components of the atom, it was only in
terms of them – and nothing else – that he tried to build a complete theory of
matter. The fact that all lines in the spectra of elements, and not only a few,
showed the Zeeman effect was, for him, proof that corpuscles were present in
large numbers in the atom.
Evidence for corpuscles came from several independent phenomena, and,
by 1899, J. J. could legitimately claim that corpuscles were universal compo-
nents of matter rather than an explanation of just cathode rays. Furthermore,
he obtained an absolute value of the charge of corpuscles, not only of the
mass-to-charge ratio, studying the electrification of metals under ultraviolet
light. This gave more direct proof that corpuscles had the same electrification
as the ion of hydrogen and, thus, that their mass was, with no little certainty,
three orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest atom: ‘From what we have
seen, this negative ion must be a quantity of fundamental importance in any
theory of electrical action; indeed, it seems not improbable that it is the fun-
damental quantity in terms of which all electrical processes can be expressed’
(Thomson, 1899b, p. 565). The line of thought in this 1899 paper clearly shows
that his theory of matter was an auxiliary hypothesis to his theory of electric
conduction:

These considerations have led me to take as a working hypothesis the

following method of regarding the electrification of a gas, or indeed
of matter in any state. I regard the atom as containing a large number
of smaller bodies which I call corpuscles; these corpuscles are equal
to each other … In the normal atom, this assemblage of corpuscles
92 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

forms a system which is electrically neutral. Though the individual

corpuscles behave like negative ions, yet when they are assembled in
a neutral atom the negative effect is balanced by something which
causes the space through which the corpuscles are spread to act as if
it had a charge of positive electricity equal in amount to the sum of
the negative charges of the corpuscles… On this view, electrification
essentially involves the splitting of the atom, a part of the mass of
the atom getting free and becoming detached from the original atom
(Thomson, 1899b, p. 565).

This line of thought was apparent in his presentations of the corpuscle in the
first years of the twentieth century (Thomson, 1901c). His main goal was to
prove the existence of electrified material particles smaller than the small-
est atom, and that these were the agents for the conduction of electricity in
gases, metals, and radioactive substances, and even in the Aurora Borealis. His
research, and that of many other researchers at the Cavendish, followed this
line (Thomson, 1900, 1901a, b, 1902a, b, c). It looks as if having an atomic
model was secondary to having a theory of electricity.
Once the existence of corpuscles was settled, J. J. began to explore all the
possibilities of an entity that seemed to hold the key to the intimate connection
between electricity and matter. It seemed to be the summit of his long-term
project of understanding the relationship between matter and electricity –
between matter and ether – that had been the driving force of his research
programme on electric discharge in gases. It would also seem to support a mon-
istic understanding of nature if one could not only explain atoms in terms of
corpuscles but also understand corpuscles in terms of the ether. The monistic
view of nature appeared to be only a step away.
The highlight of this period was his course at Yale, in May 1903, published
immediately afterwards as Electricity and Matter (Thomson, 1904a). Again, here
we find a story-line that seeks to demonstrate, first and foremost, the existence
of corpuscles and their role in explaining electrification. As an illustration,
Chapter 4, ‘The atomic structure of electricity’, comes before the chapter on
‘The atomic structure of the atom’. Without the former, he could not argue for
the latter. The contemporary reader may be further surprised by the content
of the first three chapters, which are devoted to J. J.’s very own Faraday tubes.
Corpuscles had not done away with them, but rather the contrary. Corpuscles
were actually better explained in terms of Faraday tubes when supposing that
the ‘mass of a charged particle arises from the mass of ether bound by the
Faraday tube associated with the charge’ (p. 41). This was a generalization of his
1881 calculation of the apparent mass of a charged body due to the resistance
 4.2 A world of electrons 93

in an electric field: then, he supposed the hydrodynamic resistance of a sphere

in a fluid, while now he considered the mass of ether carried by the tubes per
unit volume when moving at right angles to their axis.
A charged sphere at rest was postulated to be the origin of Faraday tubes
extending uniformly in all directions. In this case, the electric mass would be
zero, since – we should remember – Faraday tubes do have direction, and the
effects of any tube are cancelled out by another tube in the opposite direction.
When set in motion, the tubes would tend to have their axis perpendicular to
the direction of motion of the sphere, thus creating much inertia. But since
Faraday tubes repelled each other, there would be equilibrium between the
two tendencies, giving us the measure of the bound mass carried by the tubes:
‘When a Faraday tube is in the equatorial region it imprisons more of the ether
than when it is near the poles, so that the displacement if the Faraday tubes
from the pole to the equator will increase the amount of ether imprisoned
by the tubes, and therefore the mass of the body’ (Thomson, 1904a, p. 43).
Thomson went on to show that the ‘assumption that the whole of the mass is due
to the charge’ (p. 48, emphasis in the original), to which he was highly inclined,
was more than likely.
If the mass of the moving charged sphere was due to the mass of the ether
carried along by the Faraday tubes, this would mean that, in principle, the
mass of any charged particle extended indefinitely with the tubes. That was
not a problem, he argued, taking into account that in small particles like the
corpuscles, the mass of ether carried by the tubes decreased according to the
fourth power of the distance from the particle, and thus, ‘all but the most insig-
nificant fraction of mass is confined to a distance from the particle which is
very small indeed compared with the dimensions ordinarily ascribed to atoms’
(Thomson, 1904a, p. 50). And from this he advanced his dreamt-of-ontology:
‘… the whole mass of any body is just the mass of ether surrounding the body
which is carried along by the Faraday tubes associated with the atoms of the
body. In fact, that all mass is mass of the ether, all momentum, momentum of
the ether, and all kinetic energy, kinetic energy of the ether’ (p. 51).
And what was the relationship between these Faraday tubes and the charges
of electricity? Only that the latter were ‘the beginnings and the ends’ of these
tubes. Here language fails him, since he was actually saying that there was
no clear distinction between mass, charge, and ether. If the mass of a particle
expressed the mass of ether carried by Faraday tubes, electrification was the
phenomenon at the extremes of tubes. ‘If this view of the structure of electri-
city is correct, each extremity of a Faraday tube will be the place from which
a constant fixed number of tubes start or at which they arrive’ (Thomson,
1904a, p. 71).
94 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

As for the structure of the atom, J. J. was once again very cautious about the
role of corpuscles: ‘It may thus not be superfluous to consider the bearing of
the existence of corpuscles on the problem of the constitution of the atom’.
This was not simply a rhetorical device to caution his audience, but his actual
line of thought. Faraday tubes were real, the ether was real, corpuscles were
an explanation of electrification and, perhaps, of the structure of matter. This
had been the order of his preferences in research and this was the order, in
1903, of his pedagogical presentation of corpuscles. Infact, at this stage, he did
not have, strictly speaking, a model for the atom, but a research programme:
‘although the model of the atom to which we are led by these considerations
is very crude and imperfect, it may perhaps be of service by suggesting lines of
investigation likely to furnish us with further information about the constitu-
tion of the atom’ (Thomson, 1904a, p. 92).
And what was this atom like? J. J. Thomson thought of it as a collection of
what he called doublets, ‘with a negative corpuscle at one end and an equal
positive charge at the other, the two ends being connected by lines of elec-
tric force which we suppose to have a material existence’ (Thomson, 1904a,
p. 93). Thus, the atom appeared as an assemblage of Faraday tubes with one very
condensed end, forming the individual corpuscles, and another end spreading
over a comparatively much larger space. In this way, he could imagine that
‘the quantity of ether bound by the lines of force, the mass of which we regard
as the mass of the system, will be very much greater near the corpuscle than
elsewhere’ (p. 94), or, in other words, that the mass of the atom could be con-
sidered as the sum of the masses of what we see as corpuscles. This gives us an
atom about which we can speak at different levels. Deep down, it is basically
an assemblage of Faraday tubes; but, at the next level, we can visualize it as
an assemblage of corpuscles in a sea of positive electrification. With the latter
image, he discussed the problem of the stability of such a system and the light
this threw on chemical bonding and also on radioactivity.
Following the highly speculative tenor of this book, Thomson went on to
suggest the concept of ‘corpuscular temperature’, a statistical measure of the
movement of corpuscles inside the atom, analogous to the molecular tempera-
ture in the kinetic theory of gases. This temperature would account for the pos-
sibility of chemical components as well as for the stability and life of atoms. In
principle, radiation emitted by moving corpuscles is a problem for the stability
of atoms, but there was a possible way out of this problem: ‘we must remember,
too, that the corpuscles in any atom are receiving and absorbing radiation from
other atoms’ (Thomson, 1904a, p. 108). In a 1903 paper, ‘The magnetic proper-
ties of systems of corpuscles describing circular orbits’, he had dealt with the
problem of the stability of moving electrons and shown that, in a rotating ring
of corpuscles, the radiation emitted by the individual electrons interfered with
 4.2 A world of electrons 95

that of the other electrons, thus diminishing their energy loss due to radiation
(Thomson, 1903b). In his typically loose way, Thomson assumed that this phe-
nomenon would, in a system with a large number of corpuscles, cancel out all
radiation, thus making the atom a stable system.
Finally, he considered the geometry of the arrangement of corpuscles inside
the atom. The simple cases of two, three, and up to seven or eight corpus-
cles, could be calculated, giving symmetrical arrangements on the surface of
an inner sphere concentric to the sphere of the positive electrification. But for
larger numbers, the corpuscles broke up into several groups. Thinking that the
simplest atom, that of hydrogen, would have on the order of 103 corpuscles, ‘the
problem of finding the distribution when in equilibrium becomes too complex
for calculation’, and he suggested turning to the ‘simple and beautiful’ experi-
ment of the arrangement of magnets floating in a vessel of water (Thomson,
1904a, p. 117). As Figure 4.1 shows, the arrangement of the magnets in stable
layers is suggestive of the atomic properties according to the ‘Periodic Law’, by

Figure 4.1. The arrangement of magnets on a fluid was suggestive of the

properties of atoms in the Periodic Table (Thomson, 1904a, p. 115). J. J. Thomson
took the idea of Mayer’s arrangement from a loose model for radioactivity by
Lord Kelvin (W. Thomson, 1902).
96 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

which a minor increase in the mass of the elements does not render them simi-
lar in chemical properties, but, rather, we have to wait for a full cycle to find
the same properties. Not surprisingly, J. J.’s model of the atom was immediately
relevant to chemical as well as physical phenomena.
Many historians overlook these lectures Yale and repeat the claim that
the first time J. J. Thomson developed his atomic model was in a Philosophical
Magazine paper of 1904 (Thomson, 1904b). Certainly, in that paper, as well as in
a public lecture on 10 March 1905, J. J. described his atoms as an assemblage of
corpuscles, without reference to their intrinsic nature as endpoints of Faraday
tubes. His starting point was then the existence of corpuscles, the only build-
ing block from which he constructed his atomic model, without reference to
their intimate nature: ‘if the corpuscles form the bricks of the structure, we
require mortar to keep them together. I shall suppose that positive electricity
acts as the mortar, and that the corpuscles are kept together by the attraction
of positive electricity’ (Thomson, 1905b, p. 1). Faraday tubes and corpuscles
were entities at different ontological levels and J. J. thought it would be more
helpful to present his model of the atom on the basis of corpuscles, leaving
their nature for other, more specialized, audiences. In this way, he managed
to present his atom in a fashion that was very appealing to chemists as well as
to physicists. J. J. wanted to be very clear from the outset that his corpuscular
atom was the atom of both the physicists and the chemists and, thus, he could
claim to have found the final link between the two scientific traditions.

4.3 Psychic research

Ordinary material systems must be connected with invisible systems

which possess mass whenever the material systems contain electrical
charges. If we regard all matter as satisfying this condition we are
led to the conclusion that the invisible universe – the ether – is to
a large extent the workshop of the material universe, and that the
phenomena of nature as we see them are fabrics woven in the looms
of this unseen universe (Thomson, 1907f, p. 21).

This is J. J. Thomson at the end of a public lecture in Manchester, in November

1907, in which he argued that the latest discoveries in electricity proved a deep
metaphysical unity in the world, one that stemmed from the real existence
of the ether and from the fact that all phenomena in Nature were a result of
matter in movement. Two analogies permeate the rhetoric of this lecture: the
machine-like fabric of the world, and the existence of an unseen universe that
keeps that machine in productive movement. The first comparison is natural
 4.3 Psychic research 97

at the centre of British manufacturing industry. The latter resonates with that
best-seller by Tait and Stewart that had argued for a strong link between the
science of energy and the existence of spirits and their action in the visible
universe.
This mention of an unseen universe is not an isolated occurrence. In his auto-
biography, J. J. felt the need to write one full chapter, albeit the shortest, on
psychic research, a topic to which he had devoted intellectual attention and
political support, especially through his membership of the British Society of
Psychical Research (SPR), of which he was even vice-president for some time.
The society, formally founded in 1882, was intended as a scientific response
to the multitude of groups and associations interested in all kinds of paranor-
mal phenomena in Victorian Britain. Interest in spiritualism and related issues
had all sorts of motivations: as a way to prove the reality of an afterlife and
the need for religion, as a means to challenge the authority of the established
Anglican Church, as a response to the threat of increasing materialism, and as
a way to extend the scientific ethos to the matters of the mind (Gauld, 1968;
Haynes, 1982; Oppenheim, 1985). The SPR was particularly cautious about the
status of spiritual and psychic phenomena and its aim was ‘to examine with-
out prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man,
real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable in terms of any generalized
hypotheses’ (quoted in Gauld (1968) p. 137). The society was well respected
among Cantabrigian academics since amongst its most enthusiastic driving
forces were two Cambridge dons: Henry Sidgwick and Frederick Myers.
Sidgwick was a Trinity graduate in Classics who became lecturer in moral phil-
osophy and, eventually, Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy in Cambridge. In
1869, he resigned from his appointment at Trinity College, since he no longer
felt he could assent to the 39 articles of faith that fellows had to sign, although
the College found extraordinary ways to keep him until 1882, when regula-
tions were changed, and he was readmitted as an ordinary fellow. Ever since his
undergraduate years, Sidgwick had been involved in psychic research through
the Cambridge ‘Ghost Society’, and, as a mature philosopher and Anglican
apostate, he saw in spiritualism a possible way to support Christian morality
without assent to its theological content (Oppenheim, 1985, pp. 113–16). In J. J.
Thomson’s words, ‘he was one of the most brilliant talkers of his time … [and]
the most brilliant in Cambridge’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 294), and greatly involved
in reforms at the University. Particularly important was his and his wife’s work
in connection with women’s education and the creation of Newnham College.
Sidgwick became the first president of the SPR. ‘He was an ideal president
for such a society, absolutely fair and unbiased and critical’ (Thomson, 1936,
p. 299): he was a highly respected and honest man who did not hide his many
98 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

disappointments in his search for psychic and spiritual evidence. In fact,

Sidgwick was ‘notoriously unlucky as a psychical researcher’, and while people
like Crookes, Lodge, and Wallace saw indubitable evidence of some paranormal
phenomenon, Sidgwick, ‘in spite of repeated trials, … never witnessed any-
thing’ (Crookes, quoted in Oppenheim (1985) p. 124). His interest in the subject
was challenged by many disappointments, turning him into a moderate agnos-
tic and, thus, a respectable president of the society.
Myers was by far more enthusiastic than Sidgwick and the one who brought
J. J. into the SPR: ‘in the nineties, at the instance of F. H. W. Myers, I attended a
considerable number of séances at which abnormal physical effects were sup-
posed to be produced’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 147). Although no longer a lecturer
Trinity College, stayed in Cambridge as part of the intellectual elite, making
himself a name as a poet, critic and essayist. He first became interested in psy-
chic and paranormal research through the influence of Sidgwick, his under-
graduate tutor at Trinity in the 1860s, but his interest surpassed that of his
tutor’s from the 1870s onwards. Through the work of the SPR, he became
increasingly convinced of the importance of hypnotism in developing a sci-
ence of the psyche, and he developed the concept of the ‘subliminal self’, ‘the
boldest and best known of the contributions that psychical research made to
psychology before World War I’ (Oppenheim, 1985, p. 254).
In his recollections, J. J. seems to have mixed feelings about the activities of
the SPR. He was clearly disappointed by the fact that ‘at all but two of those
[séances] I attended nothing whatever happened, and in the two where some-
thing did there were very strong reasons for suspecting fraud’ (Thomson, 1936,
p. 147). In spite of that, J. J., as well as Lord Rayleigh and some other physicists
in Cambridge, ‘maintained a deep interest in the society’s work but conducted
only occasional investigations into psychical phenomena’ (Noakes, 2005, p. 426):
they were observers and not active actors in this research. Thus, they had no
serious grounds to dismiss an activity to which they were, at least in principle,
not opposed. Their interest was probably not so much in psychology, let alone
a belief in spirits and ghosts, but in the possibility of extending the domains
of physics to the study of the mind. J. J. had a more positive attitude towards
telepathy, ‘another branch of psychical research which may be connected with
physics’, and of which he had witnessed some positive instances. By the time
he wrote his memoirs, J. J. still thought that, ‘in my opinion the investigation
of short-range thought transference is of the highest importance’ (Thomson,
1936, p. 154).
One very popular story in Cambridge concerned the visit in the summer
of 1895 of an illiterate Italian peasant, Eusapia Palladino, who had acquired a
name as medium. Invited by the SPR after Lodge and Myers were convinced of
 4.4 The collapse of a dream 99

her powers at a séance in France (also attended by the more sceptical Sidgwick),
Palladino performed a number of what many saw as deceptive tricks. Apparently,
her behaviour ‘stimulated the prejudices latent in the Sidgwick group’, J. J.
included. In a most ironic paragraph, J. J. also describes the case of the famous
Madame Blavatsky in her visit to Cambridge:

One of my most interesting experiences was a séance when nothing

at all happened… She said at the beginning that her Mahatma in
Tibet would precipitate a message, a cushion and a bell, and we sat
waiting for, I should think, more than an hour, and nothing whatever
arrived. The medium was not in the least abashed. She took the
offensive, said it was all our fault, that our scepticism had created an
atmosphere impenetrable to anything spiritual. She was a short and
stout woman with an amazingly strong personality, very able and
an excellent speaker. So well did she speak that she convinced the
great majority of the audience that the failure was their fault, and
they went away thoroughly ashamed of themselves for having spoiled
what would otherwise have been a most interesting experience
(Thomson, 1936, pp. 153–4).

In spite of this account, J. J. still thought that good work was done by the SPR:
‘This work has not been wasted. To put its claims at the very lowest it is surely
a great thing to have created an organisation for collecting and testing these
abnormal phenomena and thereby to go far to ensure that no genuine ones
will escape discovery’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 299). As Richard Noakes argued,
Thomson’s interest in and membership of the SPR problematizes the positiv-
istic view that, by the turn of the century, there was a clear-cut definition of
the limits of physics. The history of psychic research needs to be seen ‘as an
episode in late-classical physics’ rather than as something alien to it (Noakes,
2008, p. 326).

4.4 The collapse of a dream

Between 1903 and 1906, J. J. Thomson published a number of papers

on the physical and chemical properties of his atomic model. The arrange-
ment of corpuscles in the atom was the crucial point in determining such
properties, and many of his papers dealt with issues such as ‘The magnetic
properties of systems of corpuscles describing circular orbits’ (Thomson,
1903b), ‘On the vibrations of atoms containing 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 corpuscles
and on the effect of a magnetic field on such vibrations’ (Thomson, 1905a),
and ‘A theory of widening of lines in the spectra’ (Thomson, 1906a), in which
100 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

he assumed that the widening of the spectral lines was ‘due to the effect of
resonance between systems which if free from each other’s influence would
vibrate in the same period’ (p. 318). Thomson’s excitement in these years was
manifested, for instance, in a letter to Rutherford, in which he expressed his
‘hopes of being able to work out a reasonable theory of chemical combin-
ation and many other chemical phenomena’, including radioactivity, based
on his atomic model (J. J. Thomson to Rutherford, 16 February 1904, CUL Add
7653, T23).
If the arrangement of corpuscles in the atom was going to be a factor relevant
to the chemical properties of atoms, he had first to determine their approxi-
mate number. Every model showed that corpuscles were distributed in differ-
ent layers and that it was only the outer ones that were really significant for
chemical properties. Calculation of such distributions was totally impracticable
if their number was of the order of the thousands, and, as we saw earlier, one
had to rely on experimental models like the one provided by Mayer’s magnets.
That is why J. J. prioritized the problem of the number of corpuscles in the
atom, eventually finding three independent ways to determine the figure. In
the first, he assumed that optical dispersion in monatomic substances was the
result of a polarization of the atom, from which he could gain information
about the mass of both positive and negative electrification. The second came
from a theory of his and C. G. Barkla, one of the first Cavendish researchers to
systematically study Roentgen rays, by which the energy of scattered X-rays
was proportional to the density of corpuscles in a gas. Measuring the disper-
sion in air of known density, Barkla calculated that there was only room for
an average of 25 corpuscles per molecule of air. Finally, and on the hypothesis
that beta absorption was a result of the collisions of radioactive particles (them-
selves also corpuscles) with the corpuscles in the absorbing substance, J. J. also
reached the conclusion that the number of corpuscles in atoms had to be of the
order of magnitude of the atomic weight.
Interestingly for the contemporary reader, the three methods relied on
the assumption that the laws of optical dispersion, X-ray diffraction and beta
absorption were the same outside and inside the atom, something that the
then emerging quantum theory was only beginning to challenge. In any case,
the three estimates coincided enough that ‘the evidence at present available
seems … sufficient to establish the conclusion that the number of corpuscles is
not greatly different from the atomic weight’ (Thomson, 1906b, p. 769). That is
how his monistic-corpuscular model came to an end, and a new set of problems
arose. If most of the atomic mass was not due to corpuscles, it had to be related
to the positive electrification. And no less importantly, with a small number
of corpuscles, the stability of the atom was under threat. It was only the large
 4.4 The collapse of a dream 101

number of corpuscles that had so far prevented the atom from collapsing due
to the radiation of moving corpuscles.
This radical change of affairs came at the time J. J was giving a series of lec-
tures at the Royal Institution in London. The course, published in 1907 as The
Corpuscular Theory of Matter, is a good exposition of J. J.’s uses of the corpuscle at
the time. As in previous presentations, his first goal was to convince his audi-
ence of the existence, properties, and nature of the corpuscles, and their use-
fulness in accounting for many physical and chemical phenomena. Famously,
however, he reiterated the heuristic character of any model, including a model
based on corpuscles, with the following:

The theory of the constitution of matter which I propose to discuss in

these lectures, is one which supposes that the various properties of
matter may be regarded as arising from electrical effects. The basis of the
theory is electricity, and its object is to construct a model atom, made up
of specified arrangements of positive and negative electricity, which shall
imitate as far as possible the properties of the real atom … The theory is
not an ultimate one; its object is physical rather than metaphysical. From
the point of view of the physicist, a theory of matter is a policy rather than a
creed; its object is to suggest, stimulate and direct experiment (Thomson,
1907a, p. 1, my emphasis).

His emphasis on policies, not creeds, is totally consistent with what we saw in
the previous chapter. What should perhaps be emphasized is that the heuris-
tic character of physical theories was also true for corpuscles and corpuscular
models of matter. Corpuscles and their behaviour were not the last word on
what matter was. As we have already seen, and shall see again in the last chap-
ter of the book, explanations in terms of corpuscles were totally compatible
with the existence of a more fundamental continuum in matter. Corpuscles
were not an alternative mutually exclusive to ether and the continuum, but a
different, more phenomenological, layer of explanation. In fact, he maintained
that the optimal theory of matter was the one based on vortex rings, but that
‘The simplicity of the assumptions of the vortex atom theory are, however,
somewhat dearly purchased at the cost of the mathematical difficulties which
are met with in its development; and for many purposes a theory whose conse-
quences are easily followed is preferable to one which is more fundamental but
also more unwieldy’ (Thomson, 1907a, p. 2).
That corpuscles were one possible, but not the ultimate, explanation of mat-
ter was made clearer when accounting for the origin of their mass. We have
already seen that J. J. considered their mass as arising from the movement of
the ether structured in Faraday tubes. But now we find J. J. drawing a surprising
102 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

conclusion, one that might sound prophetic of the emergence of de Broglie’s

principle 20 years later: ‘hence from our point of view, each corpuscle may be
said to extend throughout the whole universe, a result which is interesting in
connection with the dogma that two bodies cannot occupy the same space’
(Thomson, 1907a, p. 34). I do not mean here, of course, that J. J. Thomson some-
how predicted de Broglie’s principle, but only that, as we shall see in Chapter 6,
when de Broglie’s principle appeared on the stage, J. J. was ready and happy to
accept it in terms of his own ether-based vision of matter.
The corpuscle had come as the answer in a long research project on the
conduction of electricity in gases. But what about conduction in solids? It
was ‘somewhat remarkable’ that ‘the passage of electric conduction through
metals … by far the most familiar case of electric conduction’ was the less
understood in terms of the ‘mechanism by which conduction is effected’
(Thomson, 1907b, p. 455). And to this topic J. J. devoted a third of his Royal
Institution lectures, developing two alternative theories of electric conduction
in metals. The first, essentially the same as that first developed by Paul Drude
in 1900 (Drude, 1900a, b), assumed that the corpuscles from the atoms in the
conductor material were free and formed a kind of gaseous sea of corpuscles
in thermal equilibrium: ‘these corpuscles can move freely between the atoms
of the metal just as the molecules of air move freely about in the interstices
of a porous body’ (Thomson, 1907a, p. 51). In the presence of an external elec-
tric field, the negative carriers of electricity would move without affecting the
atoms of the conductor. In this model, calculations were analogous to the ones
in the kinetic theory of gases: the movement of corpuscles depended on the
external electric field, but also on their mutual collisions, and from this one
could calculate and relate the mean free path of a corpuscle, the specific con-
ductivity, and the number of corpuscles per unit volume.
Comparison with experimental data gave reasonable corroboration of this
first theory with phenomena like the Hall effect, the Peltier effect, and the
Thomson effect (the last named after William Thomson, Lord Kelvin), but gave
totally inconsistent results when relating the estimated number of corpus-
cles to the conductivity of metals in fast-changing electric fields. In order to
account for this inconsistency, J. J. Thomson introduced a modification to the
model. In what he called the ‘modern theory of electrical conductivity of met-
als’ (Thomson, 1907b), corpuscles were bound to their atoms, which could be
represented as electric doublets. In the presence of an electric field, these dou-
blets would tend to organise themselves along a line ‘much in the same way as
the Grotthus chains in the old theory of electrolysis’. By this theory, ‘the cor-
puscles are supposed to be pulled out of the atoms of the metal by the action of
the surrounding atoms’ when these were in line (Thomson, 1907a, p. 86), and
 4.5 The carriers of positive electricity 103

therefore there was no need for a large number of free corpuscles in movement
in order to get electric conduction.
This new theory of electric conduction in metals is clearly reminiscent of his
theories on electrolysis and on gas discharge. But there is another aspect worth
highlighting. In all these theories, J. J. Thomson needed to deal, once again,
with the asymmetry between positive and negative electrification. The latter
resided in the corpuscles, and the former in ‘molecules’ with a deficit of cor-
puscles. But the demonstration that corpuscles were not sufficient to account
for the mass of atoms and molecules made elucidation of the nature of positive
electrification pressing. To this he shifted his attention, starting in 1907.

4.5 The carriers of positive electricity

From 1907 to 1910, J. J. Thomson did not speculate any further on his
atomic model. He did not change or abandon it, but he certainly had no fur-
ther arguments to give it more consistency, due to the problem with positive
electrification and the challenge it posed to his monistic view. At the same
time, and in the absence of anything more convincing, J. J. still held the basic
tenets of the atomic model which guided his early research in positive electri-
fication. This may also explain why the textbook history of science moves from
Thomson’s ‘plum-pudding’ model to Rutherford’s 1911 nuclear atom without
drawing attention to the huge problems of the former model that became
apparent from 1907 onwards. Furthermore, as we shall see in the next chapter,
J. J. addressed again the question of the structure of the atom after 1910 only as
a tool to account for the nature and behaviour of light and radiation. Then, his
various and contradictory speculations never went beyond the limited realm of
auxiliary and ad hoc hypotheses.
His monistic theory of everything had been just one step away, as he inti-
mated to Oliver Lodge in a 1904 letter:

I have however always tried to keep the physical conception of

the positive electricity in the background because I have always
had hopes (not yet realized) of being able to do without positive
electrification as a separate entity and to replace it by some property
of the corpuscles. When one considers that all the positive electricity
does on the corpuscular theory is to provide an attractive force to
keep the corpuscles together, while all the observable properties of
the atom are determined by the corpuscles, one feels, I think, that the
positive electrification will ultimately prove superfluous and it will be
possible to get the effects we now attribute to it from some property
104 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

of the corpuscle (J. J. Thomson to Lodge, 11 April 1904, quoted in

Rayleigh 1942, pp. 140–1).

Already in 1899, when determining the absolute value for the mass of the car-
riers of negative electricity, J. J. tried to determine the same value for the posi-
tive electrification. The asymmetry between the two was very obvious, and the
conclusion he drew was that ‘the carriers of positive electricity at low pressures
seem to be ordinary molecules while the carriers of negative electricity are
very much smaller’ (Thomson, 1899b, p. 557). With this conservative attitude,
Thomson hoped not only to keep the widely accepted idea that the positive ion
of hydrogen was the smallest positive particle, in contrast with his highly revo-
lutionary hypothesis of the existence of the unprecedentedly small corpuscles,
but also to take a step in the direction of his monistic agenda.
Kanalstrahlen, as they had been known since their discovery in 1886, were
rays of positive electrification coming through a hole in the cathode of a
discharge tube. J. J. renamed them positive rays and, in his words, ‘these
rays seem to be the most promising subjects for investigating the nature
of positive electricity’ (Thomson, 1907c, p. 2). The experimental set-up he
used was reminiscent of his work on cathode rays: the pencil of positive rays
was subjected to electric and magnetic fields, because he hoped that their
deviation would give information on their nature and behaviour. Wilhelm
Wien had already studied the basic charge-to-mass ratio of positive rays at
the turn of the century. His results showed that positive rays had no definite
value of the charge-to-mass ratio except for an upper limit: that of the H+ ion.
J. J. designed his experimental set-up accordingly, expecting a range of values
rather than a specific one. To this end, he set the electric and magnetic fields
parallel to each other, so that they would produce perpendicular deflections.
With this, he expected to observe a parabola on the fluorescent screen at the
end of the tube, with a different characteristic parabola for each possible
kind of positive ray.
His first observations, although very provisional, were not in accord with
his expectations. What he saw on the fluorescent screen was more like a
straight line with a sharp upper limit corresponding to the value of charge-
to-mass ratio for the positive ion of hydrogen, and not a parabola (Figure
4.2). He also observed a few negative dots on the screen with the same range
of values for the charge-to-mass ratio (and, thus, clearly not corpuscles). His
first and very hasty conclusion was that all the positive particles were ions of
hydrogen, only their charge was statistically not constant. Since the corpus-
cles were the only bearers of electrification, the varying values of the charge-
to-mass ratio for the positive particles should be due to a variable degree
 4.5 The carriers of positive electricity 105

Figure 4.2. Under the influence of parallel magnetic (B) and electric (A) fields,
the positive rays were expected to form a characteristic parabola on the screen of
the kind y2 = (B2/A) (e/m) x, for each value of the charge-to-mass ratio but what he
detected was not exactly a parabola (Thomson, 1907d, p. 568). Courtesy: Taylor and
Francis, Ltd.

of electrification rather than a variation of their mass. Actually, Wien had,

since 1898, found similar values for the charge-to-mass ratio of Canal rays (or
Kanalstrahlen), but he had toyed with the idea that these had a fixed charge
and variable mass (Wien, 1898). To support his hypothesis, J. J. made up a
completely ad hoc mechanism that could explain the statistical variation in
the charge of the H+ particles:

Suppose that some of the particles constituting the positive rays, after
starting with a positive charge, get this charge neutralized by attracting
to them a negatively electrified corpuscle, the mass of the corpuscle
is so small in comparison with that of the particle constituting the
positive ray that the addition of the particle will not appreciably
diminish the velocity of the positive particle. Some of these neutralized
particles may be positively ionized again by collision while others may
get a negative charge by the adhesion to them of another corpuscle,
and this process might be repeated during the course of the particle.
Thus there would be among the rays some which were part of their
course unelectrified, at other parts positively electrified, and at other
points negatively electrified (Thomson, 1907c, p. 10).
106 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

Figure 4.3. The fluorescence he obtained for different gases was different to what
he expected. Only helium seemed to give patterns close to his expected parabolas
(Thomson, 1907d, p. 573). Courtesy: Taylor and Francis, Ltd.

In other words, positive rays, in their passage through the electric and mag-
netic fields, would acquire and lose negative corpuscles present in the tube,
thus causing them to experience almost random deflections, except for a max-
imum corresponding to those particles that went through the field without any
gain or loss of corpuscles. This apparent randomness in their trajectory would
show as a continuous track on the fluorescent screen. Of course, this totally
unfounded mechanism relied on the supposition that all positive rays were
necessarily H+ ions and that the different values of the charge-to-mass ratio
were due to changing charge (for which the much smaller corpuscles would
be responsible) rather than a variation in the mass of positive particles. At very
low pressures, ‘when there are very few ions in the gas, this continuous band
stretching from the origin is replaced by discontinuous patches’ (Thomson,
1907c, p. 10), which also seemed to reinforce his supposed mechanism of the
continuous exchange of corpuscles on their way through the discharge tube.
Furthermore, when he tried to observe the behaviour of positive rays in tubes
filled with different gases, he did not find differences in the pattern of the
fluorescence he observed (See Figure 4.3), even when, as he thought, he made
sure that there was no hydrogen in the original tube (see Thomson (1907d)).
His hope had been to obtain characteristic patterns depending of the atomic
weight of the gas, but this he did not find except for the case of helium.
In many of these early experiments, especially those at relatively low pres-
sures, J. J. Thomson found two clearly distinct patches, rather than one, with
different maxima, the first corresponding to the charge-to-mass ratio for
hydrogen, the second to the same value for helium. The latter he reinterpreted
as confirming the fact that helium ions, which had recently proved to be the
alpha particles of radioactivity, played a central role in the structure of the
 4.5 The carriers of positive electricity 107

atom. As for the characteristic parabolas he had initially expected from other
gases, he hoped he might obtain them if he managed to obtain accurate results
at very low pressures and high potentials. For the time being, he assumed that
the positive rays inevitably broke up into the more elementary H+ and alpha
particles he was now observing. As Falconer showed, he never thought that the
problem might come from the poor sensitivity of his willemite screen to heavy
ions (Falconer, 1988, p. 281). What he did do, instead, was to make sure that
there was no prior contamination of hydrogen in his experiments, which he
(wrongly) thought he had successfully achieved.
The central tenet of his theory in the period 1907–1910 was what he called
the neutral doublet. His observations also included a very strong luminescent
spot corresponding to a large number of non-deflected, and therefore neutral,
rays. His hypothesis was that the positive rays were produced after the cathode:
in the strong field near the cathode, the gas molecules would release neutral
doublets composed of a corpuscle and a positive element. The corpuscle might,
in some cases, be set free from the doublet, producing an H+ ion, which, in
turn, would be deflected by the electric and magnetic fields in the tube in the
way described above. In 1909, J. J. thought he had enough evidence to suggest
that ‘even at the start from the cathode the Kanalstrahlen include a large num-
ber of neutral doublets, if indeed they do not wholly consist of them’, as he
certainly hoped. From this, he speculated that ‘these neutral doublets are very
interesting, as they form an intermediate stage between the ion and the neu-
tral molecule’ (Thomson, 1909b, p. 828).
This intermediate state of matter would help explain the mechanism of
ionization and, indirectly, the processes by which electricity was transmitted,
while, at the same time, keeping his corpuscle-only theory of electrification.
Furthermore, and although he did not make it explicit, this doublet model was
reminiscent of the duality of charges involved in Faraday tubes (Falconer, 1988,
p. 284). In any case, his results were still too provisional (and, as we shall see in
the next chapter, totally wrong) to be a basis for any further speculation on the
role of the positive electrification in the structure of the atom.From 1907 on, he
did not make any refinement to his so-called ‘plum-pudding’ model: if he could
not better understand the mechanism by which H+ particles were formed, he
had no arguments with which to modify his ideas on the structure of the atom.
At the height of his early research period on positive rays, J. J. Thomson was
president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which, in
1909, met in Winnipeg, Canada. In his presidential address, J. J. described his
work on positive rays as the latest step along a path that, starting with the dis-
covery of X-rays, had revealed, in gases exposed to these rays, ‘the presence of
particles charged with electricity; some of these particles [being] charged with
108 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

positive, others with negative electricity’ (Thomson, 1909a, p. 10). The asym-
metry between the two types of particles was, however, puzzling:

We know a great deal about the negative electricity; what do we

know about positive electricity? Is positive electricity molecular in
structure? Is it made up into units, each unit carrying a charge equal
in magnitude though opposite in sign to that carried by a corpuscle?
Does, or does not, this unit differ, in size and physical properties, very
widely from the corpuscle? (Thomson, 1909a, p. 12).

His experiments and those of other researchers at the Cavendish ‘lead to the
conclusion that the atoms of the different chemical elements contain def-
inite units of positive as well as of negative electricity, and that the positive
electricity, like the negative, is molecular in structure’ (Thomson, 1909a, p. 13).
Thomson was, however, too cautious to unequivocally affirm that he had iso-
lated the particle of positive electricity, ‘for we have to be on our guard against
its being a much smaller body attached to the hydrogen atoms’. In other words,
it might still be the case that positive electrification came in small particles,
similar to the negative electrification, and that the bulk of the mass of the atom
was due to a neutral mass.
That may explain why, from 1907, J. J. did not construct an alternative and
consistent model for the atom. As with his discovery of the corpuscle, his first
aim was to clarify the mechanisms and structure of electricity and only later
moved to atomic structure. Since the nature of positive electrification was not
yet clear, there was no basis on which to modify the existing model of the
atom or propose a new one. In a laconic sentence in his presidential address,
he acknowledged that ‘since electrified particles can be studied with so much
greater ease than unelectrified ones, … we shall obtain a knowledge of the
ultimate structure of electricity before we arrive at a corresponding degree
of certainty with regard to the structure of matter’ (Thomson, 1909a, p. 11).
Furthermore:

A knowledge of the mass and size of the two units of electricity, the
positive and the negative, would give us the material for constructing
what may be called a molecular theory of electricity, and would be
a starting-point for a theory of the structure of matter; for the most
natural view to take, as a provisional hypothesis is that matter is
just a collection of positive and negative units of electricity, and that
the forces which hold atoms and molecules together, the properties
which differentiate one kind of matter from another, all have their
origin in the electrical forces exerted by positive and negative units
 4.6 Cambridge as a playground: George Paget Thomson 109

of electricity grouped together in different ways in the atoms of the

different elements. As it would seem that the units of positive and
negative electricity are of very different sizes, we must regard matter
as a mixture containing systems of very different types, one type
corresponding to the small corpuscle, the other to the large positive
unit (Thomson, 1909a, p. 14).

The so-called plum-pudding model, which was more the basis of a research
programme than a real model, was, as it were, in quarantine. The properties
of the atom had to depend, in ways not yet clear, also on the structure and
arrangement of the carriers of positive, as well as negative, electricity.

4.6 Cambridge as a playground: George Paget Thomson

The visit to Canada was J. J.’s third trip across the ocean and the first
one on which he took his son, now aged 17, with him. In the presidential
address, G. P., who was soon to begin his undergraduate studies, heard his
father describe the ideal training of a physicist in the following terms, which
was not just a manifesto but also a rather accurate explanation of the path he
had promoted to his son:

… the specialisation prevalent in schools often prevents students of

science from acquiring sufficient knowledge of mathematics; it is
true that most of those who study physics do some mathematics, but
I hold that, in general, they do not do enough, and that they are not
as efficient as they would be if they had a wider knowledge of that
subject … Two points of view are better than one, and the physicist
who is also a mathematician possesses a most powerful instrument
for scientific research with which many of the greatest discoveries
have been made (Thomson, 1909a, p. 6).

George Paget Thomson belonged to that particular brand of British sci-

entists with deep roots in Cambridge University. The son of ‘Mr and
Mrs J. J.’, G. P. was born in 1892 at 6 Scroope Terrace, Cambridge, just a
few minutes’ walk from the Cavendish Laboratory. Until the age of 9, he
was educated mainly by his mother: ‘I never can be sufficiently grateful to
my mother’s teaching. Things were interesting and it was clear which had
reasons and which had not’ (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 13). Moreover, ‘I was
left-handed and my mother wisely allowed me to write that way, so I escaped
the defect of stammering, then so common among the left-handed’ (p. 4).
In 1899, the Thomson family (at the time only Mr & Mrs J. J., and G. P.; his
110 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

younger sister Joan, was born in 1902) moved to a detached house on West
Road, where they stayed until 1920. From there, G. P. attended King’s College
Choir School and later the Perse School, both in Cambridge. His playground
was at times the Backs, where he remembered ‘playing at telephoning from
some of [the trees] at a very early age’ (p. 3), and most of his peers were the
offspring of other well-established Cambridge families, since both schools
were mainly day-schools.
At the time G. P. started going to school, J. J. was becoming internationally
famous for his discovery of corpuscles, and, at the age of 14, he saw his father
receive the Nobel Prize for his work on electric discharge. In his autobiograph-
ical notes, he recalled the office of his father as the sancta sanctorum of the
house, into which he would make ‘semi-legal invasions … in the morning to
borrow blue pencils’ (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 3). In several accounts, J. J. is
portrayed as a very absent-minded person (Rayleigh, 1942, Chapter 7). G. P.
contributes to this idea, describing him as ‘a much loved but inscrutable Jove,
mostly in the Olympian clouds of his own thoughts’ (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 16).
He was distant, but not totally oblivious to his only son’s needs. G. P. was pas-
sionate about making model sailing ships, a hobby that he maintained all his
life (Moon, 1977, p. 531), and this may have helped in his decision to pursue
a career in physics. The following anecdote is illustrative of the possible early
influence his father had on his decision to become a physicist. The first models
did not quite work:

My mother, when consulted, spoke about centres of gravity as applied

to tables and carts, but this was clearly different, so I took the case
to the highest court, my father. He explained roughly how a ship
differed from a cart for this purpose and said the stability could be
calculated by mathematics and that this was done for real ships. I was
much impressed, gave up the idea of a career in archaeology which
had attracted me up till then and decided that mathematics and ships
should be my future (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 11).

G. P. was given permission to get wood and materials from the Cavendish. The
head mechanic of the laboratory, W. G. Pye, provided him with everything he
needed and helped him in the construction of some of the biggest models, and
J. H. Poynting provided him with a collection of working model guns for them.
We can therefore imagine the young G. P. playing in the same laboratory where
J. J. was working on cathode rays, C. T. R. Wilson was improving his cloud cham-
ber, Rutherford was undertaking his first experimental work on X-rays, and
Glazebrook was giving his last lectures in physics before resigning as Assistant
Director of the Cavendish.
 4.6 Cambridge as a playground: George Paget Thomson 111

At the Perse School, G. P. was taught classics, mathematics, and sciences by

teachers who were mostly graduates of Cambridge University. This is import-
ant since, as we saw in the first chapter, the particular way mathematics and
physics were taught in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos had spread to most
public schools in Britain through high wranglers becoming schoolmasters. In
Warwick’s words, ‘the success of the wrangler schoolmaster in reproducing the
coaching system in schools and colleges throughout Britain is evident in the
escalating levels of technical competence expected of Cambridge freshmen’. It
was also significant that ‘Wrangler masters also knew from firsthand experi-
ence how hard, for how long, and in what manner students needed to study
in order to tackle difficult problems with the speed and confidence that would
win them a Minor Scholarship to the university’ (Warwick, 2003a, pp. 260–1).
However, G. P. Thomson had a very special pre-university education.
Concerned that the Perse School might not be giving enough scientific train-
ing, his father arranged for him to receive private mathematical coaching
by H. W. Turnbull (second wrangler in 1907), and to attend the brilliant lec-
tures on introductory physics given by Alex Wood at the Cavendish: ‘These
were outstanding both in material and exposition, and impressed me greatly’
(G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 27). J. J. was happy with his son’s choice of an aca-
demic career in science, and he was determined to help him pursue it: when
the classics master of the Perse School suggested that G. P. was suitable for a
career in classics, J. J. dismissed the suggestion and kept encouraging his son to
follow in his footsteps and become a scientist. His advice was that G. P. should
stick to the same path he himself had trodden in his youth, i.e., to study for the
Mathematical Tripos and only later to move to experimental physics. ‘He main-
tained that mathematics was a very important thing and you would learn phys-
ics somehow, roughly speaking’ (G. P. Thomson, Oral Interview, AHQP, Tape T2,
side 2). J. J. kept this opinion throughout his life. In his memoirs we can read:
‘I am glad that I came under the older system, for I probably read much more
mathematics than I should have done if I had taken my degree a few years later.
I have found this of great value (c’est le premier pas qui coûte)’ (Thomson, 1936, p. 39).
Another relevant detail is that, during the summer between leaving King’s and
starting at the Perse school, J. J. also tutored his son:

In the summer before going to the Perse I was taught for the first
time by my father … I tried not very successfully to teach myself
the differential calculus, with greater success my father taught me
elementary mechanics from Glazebrook’s well known textbooks …
We also did some other mathematics. Whether by intent or otherwise
he was not lavish in his explanations and I had to think harder than I
112 On creeds and policies: the corpuscular theory of matter

had ever done before, or indeed have often done since. One problem
in continued fractions which he solved by what was virtually an
application of finite differences bothered me for days and still sticks
to my mind (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 20–1).

All these details help us understand the upbringing of someone who, at the
time of becoming an undergraduate in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos
in 1910, had already deeply impressed upon his soul the particular ethos of
this institution. As a result of his previous training, G. P. managed to take the
exams for the Mathematical Tripos after two years, in the spring of 1912, when,
at the time, most people took three years to finish the Mathematical Tripos.
Since a Cambridge degree was only conferred after three years in residence,
G. P. sat in on many lectures experimental physics, including those given by his
father, and sat the exam for Part II of the Natural Science Tripos in the spring
of 1913. Therefore, G. P.’s academic training included an unusual combination of
advanced and fundamental mathematics together with a sound knowledge of
experimental physics.
The teaching of physics in Cambridge in the early 1910s was still centred
on the nature and properties of electricity and its interaction with matter. The
world of Cambridge was, like most of the physics world of the time, still a
world of ether. The two major Professors of Physics, J. J. Thomson and Joseph
Larmor, had developed parallel theories in which the ether was one of the
central entities. Larmor’s (1900) book Aether and Matter and Thomson’s (1903a)
work Conduction of Electricity through Matter were the two major manifestations
of Cambridge physics. There was almost nothing of the new quantum physics.
‘I think,’ G. P. said later in life, ‘the quantum theory in my undergraduate days
was something which was regarded by people with a good deal of reserve’
(G. P. Thomson, Oral Interview, AHQP, Tape T2, side 2).
There is an interesting anecdote about his first days in college, which will
prove relevant to the events to be described in Chapter 6. When his tutor
recommended that he should attend lectures by the famous mathematician
G. H. Hardy, G. P. already had strong opinions about mathematics and he chal-
lenged the advice. He had read an introduction to pure mathematics in which
Hardy ‘used in a simple form some of the more rigorous methods of proof
till then little considered in British mathematical teaching though common
abroad’ (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 28). In later life, he regretted this decision,
since it prevented him from following some of the mathematical develop-
ments of the new quantum mechanics of the mid-1920s, but he still justified
it saying that ‘the pleasure of mathematics lies less in any aesthetic appreci-
ation of their beauty than in the sense of power over a range of ideas which
 4.6 Cambridge as a playground: George Paget Thomson 113

ability to handle them mathematically brings with it’ (p. 29). As we shall see,
such an approach to mathematics created a strong divide between a gener-
ation of physicists for whom rationality was linked to mechanical models and
those, like Dirac, for whom the beauty of mathematical symmetries was a
strong element in the development of theories.
G. P.’s father taught a course called ‘Electricity and matter’, which contained
much of his research after the discovery of the corpuscle. And father and son
met regularly, every week, on Sunday for lunch and a walk in the fens. In these
conversations, J. J. would recommend to his son which books to read, all of
which he could, of course, find in his parent’s house (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 35).
Scientific collaboration between father and son was only a matter of time.
 5

Father and son. Old and new physics

5.1 The nature of light

Is light a wave or a stream of particles? As we saw in Chapter 3, the

sudden appearance of Roentgen rays on the stage in 1895 sparked J. J.’s interest
in cathode rays, subsequently leading to his determination of the charge-to-
mass ratio of corpuscles. The latter turned out to be the answer to his quest for
a mechanism to explain electrical conductivity and the relationship between
matter and electricity. Electricity revealed itself as corpuscular, as acting in
fundamentally discrete units. Roentgen rays were instrumental in this atom-
ization of charge, but they also opened up a more troublesome Pandora’s box:
that of the nature of light. Because it was very soon clear that Roentgen rays
had properties similar to those of light at high frequencies, except that they
did not spread uniformly in time: they behaved like pulses, like a stream of
particles.
Since his early days as a Mathematical Tripos student, J. J. Thomson had lived
in a world in which light was an electromagnetic wave in the ether. Certainly,
many general histories of science talk about a permanent tension between the
corpuscular and undulatory theories of light from the days of Newton until
the advent of Einstein’s quantum of light. But, in fact, light was, especially
in late-nineteenth-century Cambridge, nothing but a wave. Hertz’s experi-
ments had consolidated what was a generally accepted theory of light into a
‘virtual certainty’ (Wheaton, 1983, p. 11). In this context, British physicists fol-
lowed the path first forged by the Lucasian professor G. G. Stokes, explaining
Roentgen rays in terms of impulses (Stokes, 1896), a hypothesis that seemed
to be consistent with J. J.’s 1897 idea that cathode rays were electrified corpus-
cles. Consequently, in early 1898, Thomson published a paper in Philosophical

114
 5.1 The nature of light 115

Magazine in which he put forward ‘a theory of the connexion between cathode

and Röntgen rays’ (Thomson, 1898b). When a moving corpuscle suddenly came
to a halt, some time was required for the change to propagate through the
surrounding electric and magnetic fields, the further away from the corpuscle
the more time it took. Such a change would be communicated in the form of
a pulse generated by the stopping of the charged corpuscle in the electromag-
netic field. Thomson showed mathematically that the width of such a pulse is
proportional to the diameter of the corpuscle. ‘The theory I wish to put for-
ward’, he said, ‘is that the Röntgen rays are these thin pulses of electric and
magnetic disturbance which are started when the small negatively charged
particles which constitute the cathode rays are stopped’ (p. 173). In 1903, he
developed this idea more fully and in the more visual terms of his Faraday
tubes:

Let us consider the case of a charged point moving so slowly that the
Faraday tubes are uniformly distributed, and suppose the point to be
suddenly stopped, the effect of stopping the point will be that a pulse
travels outwards from it …, but as the Faraday tubes have inertia they
will until the pulse reaches them go on moving uniformly…, i.e. they
will continue in the same state of motion as before the stoppage of
the point.… Thus the stoppage of the charged particle is accompanied
by the propagation outwards of a thin pulse of very intense electric
and magnetic force; pulses produced in this way constitute, I believe,
the Rontgen rays (Thomson, 1903a, p. 537–9).

The hypothesis that X-rays were regular pulses and not a periodic wave was, in
1903, generally accepted, both in Britain and in the Continent. The challenge
that the first observation of the diffraction of X-rays had posed to the pulse
hypothesis was, at least for a time, explained away by Sommerfeld: rather than
imagining the pulse as the observational side of a set of otherwise-continuous
waves (following Fourier’s analysis), one could think of the pulse as a new form
of light wave, there being some sort of continuity in the spectrum between the
perfectly periodic waves of monochromatic light and the pulses forming X-rays
(Wheaton, 1983, pp. 29–48). Also coming into the picture were the gamma-rays
from radioactivity, which were increasingly understood as being analogous to
X-rays.
The continuity between X-rays and ordinary light waves that Sommerfeld
was suggesting found a speculative echo in J. J. Thomson. Now that he had a
theory to account for the former, the latter surely had to be explained in simi-
lar terms. Thus, if one pulse of vibration on a Faraday tube came from the sud-
den stopping of a corpuscle, one could equally imagine that ‘if a charged body
116 Father and son. Old and new physics

were made to vibrate in such a way that its acceleration went through periodic
changes, periodic waves of electric and magnetic force would travel out from
the charged body’ (Thomson, 1904a, p. 62). These would, by Maxwell’s theory,
be light waves. With this link between Faraday tubes and the propagation of
light, J. J. introduced some sort of discreteness in the structure of light:

The Faraday tubes stretching through the ether cannot be regarded

as entirely filling it. They are rather to be looked upon as discrete
threads embedded in a continuous ether, giving to the latter a fibrous
structure; but if this is the case, then on the view we have taken of a
wave of light the wave itself must have a structure, and the front of
the wave, instead of being, as it were, uniformly illuminated, will be
represented by a series of bright specks where the Faraday tubes cut
the wave front (Thomson, 1904a, p. 63).

Around 1903, J. J. was concerned about the discrete ionization that X-rays
seemed to produce. Already in 1896, Thomson was surprised by the existence
of saturation in the ionization produced by Roentgen rays, a discovery that a
Canadian student of his at the Cavendish, Robert McClung, corroborated in
1902. This meant that only a fraction of the molecules irradiated by X-rays
were actually ionized, and that this ionization was independent of external fac-
tors such as the temperature of the irradiated substance. A discrete wave-front
such as the one obtained using the image above of Faraday tubes could be the
answer to this ‘paradox of quantity’ in ionization (Wheaton, 1983, chapter 4).
J. J. came back to this fibrous structure of the ether in 1907, after briefly
embracing the popular ‘triggering hypothesis’ first suggested by Lenard to
explain the photoelectric effect. According to the latter, the fact that the emis-
sion of corpuscles by incident light was dependent on its frequency and not
on its intensity could be explained if the energy with which corpuscles were
emitted pre-existed in the atoms, the role of the incident beam of light being
only to trigger their release. ‘On this view,’ Thomson wrote, ‘… the rays act as
detonators, causing some of the atoms on which they fall to explode, and the
energy of the corpuscle is derived from the energy liberated by this explosion’
(Thomson, 1905c, p. 588). That would relate photoelectricity to radioactivity,
both being a release of energy due to some internal rearrangement of the cor-
puscles in the atom. Not surprisingly, J. J. related this to the internal structure
of the atom, about which he speculated much around that time:

We can, however, easily conceive an atom constructed in such a

way that before the internal energy had diminished sufficiently to
appreciably alter many of its properties, the atom would become
 5.1 The nature of light 117

unstable and explode, breaking up into atoms of elements of a

different kind. Suppose, for example, that the atom consists of a
number of corpuscles arranged in layers on the surfaces of concentric
shells, and that the loss of internal energy by the atom as mainly due
to the loss of kinetic energy by those corpuscles in the outer layer,
this will hardly affect the times of vibrations of the corpuscles inside,
while the outer layers may lose such a large amount of energy that
their configuration becomes unstable, and the corpuscles in the outer
layers rearrange themselves: in doing this, such a large amount of
kinetic energy may be liberated that the atom explodes and breaks
up into atoms of different kinds. Thus, in a case of this kind we
should have the atom losing internal energy and yet as long as it
remained intact the great majority of its periods of vibration would
be unaltered, and the atom would explode before the change in its
internal energy was sufficient to appreciably affect the great majority
of its properties (Thomson, 1905c, p. 590).

Although the triggering hypothesis as an explanation of the photoelectric

effect was very popular among scientists until 1911 (Wheaton, 1983, p. 75),
J. J. abandoned it in 1907, for he found a way to account for both ionization and
the photoelectric effect using his model of pulses travelling in Faraday tubes.
The way this happened is a good example of the speed at which J. J.’s specula-
tive mind could change to account for the latest experimental input. At the end
of June, he presented a paper by a research student of his, P. D. Innes, to the
Proceedings of the Royal Society giving further evidence for the explosion theory
(Innes, 1907). Innes showed that when different metals were irradiated with
Roentgen rays, the velocity of the emitted photoelectrons1 was independent
of the energy of the incident radiation. Encouraged by J. J.’s explosion theory,
Innes argued that the speed of the emitted electrons could largely be explained
as the result of an accumulation of internal energy in the corpuscles of the
atoms and subsequent explosion. By October, however, J. J. had changed his
mind and gone back to his explanation in terms of a structure of light after
hearing about the experiments of Erich Ladenburg, a Berlin-based physicist
(Ladenburg, 1907).
Innes had also shown that the velocity of the photoelectrons emitted by
different metals was dependent on the atomic number of the atoms, but he
did not pay direct attention to the range of velocities from a given metal.

1
This paper by a research student of J. J. Thomson shows the terminological fuss still
present at the Cavendish in 1907: the terms electrons, corpuscles, photoparticles, and
β-corpuscles are used interchangeably throughout the paper.
118 Father and son. Old and new physics

Ladenburg’s experiments with ultraviolet light did look into this variable and
concluded that the velocity of the emitted electrons varied continuously with
the frequency of the incident light. For Thomson this was a problem: if the role
of the incident radiation was to trigger an internal explosion in the atom, one
should expect some frequencies to be particularly efficiently generated, i.e.,
those resonating with the internal vibrations of the corpuscles. But since that
was not the case, J. J. interpreted Ladenburg’s experiments as implying that
every atom had a large number of internal vibrations among its corpuscles so
that each incident frequency found a resonating mode within the atom. At a
time when the number of corpuscles had already been cut down to the order of
the atomic number, this was ‘improbable’. ‘It seems more reasonable,’ he said,
‘to suppose that the velocity is imparted by the light, and yet… the velocity is
independent of the intensity of the light’ (Thomson, 1907e, p. 422). His sug-
gestion was that these results could only make sense if ‘a wave of light is not
a continuous structure, but that its energy is concentrated in units’, as he had
already put forward in 1903.
The image he used to visualize the discrete structure of light followed
the thread of his 1903 theory. He supposed that ‘the ether has disseminated
through it discrete lines of electric force and that these are in a state of ten-
sion and that light consists of transverse vibrations, Röntgen rays of pulses,
travelling along these lines’ (Thomson, 1907e, p. 421). The energy of the wave
would be concentrated in these pulses, thus giving a discrete appearance to
the wave-front when traversing a black screen: ‘the energy of the wave is thus
collected into isolated regions, these regions being the portions of the lines of
force occupied by the pulses or wave motion’. The effect would be, of course,
very similar to that given by what he called ‘the old emission theory’ that spoke
of corpuscles of light. The independence from intensity was explained in the
following terms: ‘if we consider light falling on a metal plate, if we increase
the distance of the source of light’, and considering spherical symmetry from
the source, ‘we shall diminish the number of these different bundles or units
falling on a given area of the metal, but we shall not diminish the energy in the
individual units’.
The latter would explain why the energy of the emitted particle did not
depend on the intensity of the incident light. But J. J. had now to explain
Ladenburg’s finding that the speed of the photoparticles was dependent on
the frequency of the light with which it was irradiated. He faced this prob-
lem by moving a step backwards and incorporating into the picture his the-
ory of the formation of Roentgen rays (which, by ‘analogy’, would be valid for
other forms of light): when cathode rays suddenly stopped, they would emit
Roentgen rays, with the more rapidly moving (thus, more energetic) cathode
 5.2 The early theory of the quantum 119

particles producing thinner pulses (thus, higher frequencies). Thus, the energy
present in each unit of light would depend on its frequency, which is what
Ladenburg’s experiments showed.
Although, ten years later, Robert Millikan saw this theory as almost equiva-
lent to Einstein’s 1905 corpuscular theory of light (Millikan, 1917, pp. 221–3), it
is clear from Thomson’s words that his structured light is perfectly within the
bounds of ether physics. It is the physicality of Faraday tubes which allows for
this structure of light:

Thus the structure of the light would be of an exceedingly coarse

character, and could perhaps best be pictured by supposing the
particles on the old emission theory replaced by isolated transverse
disturbances along the lines of force. The greater the frequency of
the light the greater is the energy in each unit, so that if it requires a
definite amount of energy to liberate a corpuscle from a molecule of
a gas, light whose wave length exceeds a particular value, which may
depend on the nature of the gas, will be unable to ionize the gas, for
then the energy per unit will fall below the value required to ionize
the gas (Thomson, 1907e, p. 423).

As is well known, the tension between corpuscular and undulatory theories

of light persisted until the general acceptance of the Einstein’s quantum of
light and the formulation of a generalized principle of wave-particle duality,
both in the mid-1920s (Stuewer, 1975). In the meantime, physicists had to come
to terms in the best way they could with what J. J. famously called a ‘battle
between a tiger and a shark’ (Thomson, 1925, p. 15).

5.2 The early theory of the quantum

In the aforementioned presidential address of 1909 to the British

Association for the Advancement of Science in Winnipeg, J. J. felt there was a
need to stress the reality of the ether:

The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher;

it is as essential to us as the air we breathe. For we must remember
that we on this earth are not living on our own resources; we are
dependent from minute to minute upon what we are getting from the
sun, and the gifts of the sun are conveyed to us by the ether. It is to the
sun that we owe not merely night and day, springtime and harvest,
but it is the energy of the sun, stored up in coal, in waterfalls, in food,
that practically does all the work of the world (Thomson, 1909a, p. 15).
120 Father and son. Old and new physics

We find this statement in the context of a long survey on the status of con-
temporary physics: the nature of light, the interaction between electricity
and matter, and the origin of energy in radioactivity; they all seem to point
towards the ether, in spite of its seemingly contradictory properties. ‘The
study of this all-pervading substance,’ he says, ‘is perhaps the most fascinat-
ing and important duty of the physicist’ (Thomson, 1909a, p. 15), as opposed
to the chemist, whose main research topic should be matter and its combin-
ations. This clear defence of the reality of the ether acts as the preamble to
his first public mention of the ‘very remarkable series of investigations on the
Thermodynamics of Radiation’ by Planck, which has ‘lately received a great
deal of support’ (p. 21).
This brings us to a new question, one that remains cogent through the rest
of this book: what was J. J. Thomson’s attitude towards the new quantum the-
ory emerging mainly in the German-speaking world? As we just saw, J. J. was
not unaware of the fact that some exchanges of energy between radiation and
matter presented discrete aspects, but he was continually bringing forward
some ad hoc mechanism to account for such apparent discreteness. The the-
ory of the quantum that was gaining momentum on the Continent took the
quantum of energy as the primary explanatory tool without speculating on
what kind of internal mechanism caused energy to be transferred in multiples
of Plank’s constant h. The quantum was only loosely conceptualized, but this
did not prevent it from gaining popularity among an increasing number of
physicists, especially after h was seen to explain not only the radiation of a
black body but also the specific heat of solids. A most radical interpretation of
the quantum held that h was not only a phenomenological feature in the inter-
change of energy, but that it was moreover the atomic unit of energy itself. This
latter interpretation was linked to Einstein’s 1905 suggestion of the quantum
of light and had only a few early supporters like Johannes Stark.
As Russell McCormmach argued long ago, J. J. probably studied Planck’s the-
ory from his 1906 book on heat radiation (Planck, 1906), and understood it as
an alternative physical model explaining the structure of light, more along
the lines of Einstein and Stark than that of Planck himself (McCormmach,
1967, pp. 374–8). According to Thomson, Planck had deduced the second law
of thermodynamics using the quantum hypothesis, but that could not be a
good strategy: ‘if it were a legitimate deduction,’ he wrote, ‘it would appear
that only a particular type of mechanism for the vibrators which give out light
and absorbers which absorb it could be in accordance with [the Second Law of
Thermodynamics]’ (Thomson, 1909a, p. 21). But this obviously had to be wrong
since ‘if this were so, then, regarding the universe as a collection of machines
all obeying the laws of dynamics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics would
 5.2 The early theory of the quantum 121

only be true for a particular kind of machine’. In other words, J. J. Thomson

could certainly not agree to a theory in which the transfer of energy was in dis-
crete units not as a result of the nature of the mechanism (like in his Faraday
tubes model) but as an a priori imposition to the model. The quantum had to
be a consequence, not a precondition.
J. J. encouraged a number of people at the Cavendish to check for evidence
of discreteness in phenomena like interference or correlation at very low inten-
sities otherwise perfectly explained by the wave theory of light. Among them,
Norman R. Campbell, a research assistant at the Cavendish and fellow of Trinity
College, was the only one seriously convinced of the validity of Einstein’s quan-
tum of light and the need to do away with the ether. Sadly for him, and ‘con-
trary to the hopes of the author, no evidence has been produced against the
“spherical wave” theory’ (Campbell, 1910, p. 521), since his experimental set-
up produced too many fluctuations. In any case, J. J. Thomson was increasingly
nervous in the face of what some, including Campbell, started to regard as the
‘modern theory’, free of ether and continuity (Campbell, 1909, p. 117), and he
moved a step forward in his search to accommodate the discrete phenomena
of light in a continuous ether-filled world.
He now thought of reducing the number of Faraday tubes originating from
a corpuscle to one. Following the tradition that the electric field spreads out
from a charged body in all directions, J. J. had so far imagined a large number of
Faraday tubes starting from one corpuscle and dispersing with spherical sym-
metry into space. But now he decided to regard this uniformity of the field in all
directions as a statistical measure stemming from the fact that most work on
electricity was done with bodies containing a large number of corpuscles, ‘the
result [being] the same whether each individual field is uniformly distributed
in all directions or is confined within a small solid angle’ (Thomson, 1910a,
p. 302). What he got from this was that ‘the electric field due to a number of
corpuscles is a mosaic, as it were, made up of a number of detached fields.
The electric field itself, as well as the electric charges in it, being molecular
in constitution’. As in his previous model, radiation originated in the sudden
stopping of a corpuscle and the transmission of the corresponding kick along
the Faraday tube. By contrast, however, energy did not spread in all directions
but only in one: the direction corresponding to the one and only Faraday tube.
His theory more and more resembled the old emission theory, treating each
kick in the Faraday tube as a unit of light that could interact with other units
in the way particles do when they collide, but would ‘be in agreement with the
undulatory theory in supposing that the electrical disturbance whose propaga-
tion constitutes light is a vector quantity’ (p. 311), i.e., that the electromagnetic
field travels perpendicular to the direction of the kick. (Interestingly, what
122 Father and son. Old and new physics

J. J. referred to as the undulatory theory was Maxwell’s theory of light, not so

much the fact that light was a wave, but the fact that light was the propagation
of an electromagnetic disturbance.)
As for phenomena like interference, he thought that, unlike a purely corpus-
cular theory of light, his theory could also account for it. In his view, one could
get interference if a large number of Faraday tubes with related frequencies
in their fluctuations went through a slit. And this might be possible, taking
into account that, although each Faraday tube was originating in one corpuscle
only, one could easily imagine that corpuscles close to each other would have
movements of related frequencies: ‘For consider a corpuscle vibrating in a def-
inite period; in its neighbourhood there will be many other systems having
the same time of vibration, and the vibrations of these will be excited by res-
onance and will be in phase relation with the primary vibration’ (Thomson,
1910a, p. 311–2). Even though, as usual, J. J. basically stayed at a qualitative
level, his model appeared to be far superior to the quantum hypothesis, since
the latter could not at all explain interference phenomena. We should perhaps
remember that, partly because of this, few people were convinced by Einstein’s
quantum of light in the 1910s and that, in this respect, J. J. was not alone in
opposing it.
The interaction between radiation and matter, which had been the origin
of Planck’s hypothesis, was a different matter. The early quantum theory was
gaining in popularity since it was proving successful in explaining an increas-
ing array of phenomena. In 1911, the first Solvay conference met in Brussels,
becoming the first international meeting dealing with the question of the quan-
tum. J. J. Thomson was invited but did not attend possibly due in part to dis-
agreement with the emphasis on the quantum and in part to his reluctance to
travel to places where English was not the lingua franca. That he did not like the
favour Planck’s theory was gaining is clear in a number of his papers between
1911 and 1914, in which he directly addressed the theory of the quanta and its
limitations. In a 1910 paper where he discussed a theory of radiation based on
the collision of corpuscles with molecules, he admitted that ‘there are many
phenomena which can be interpreted as indicating that the energy in radiation
is made up of definite units, and that these units are indivisible’ (Thomson,
1910b, p. 243). But this was no reason for such a theory to be the right one
since, he asked, ‘why should a unit of light when passing over a corpuscle be
obliged to communicate to it either the whole of its energy or none at all?’
(p. 244). To address this problem, he brought in an element from his research
on positive rays, the neutral doublets, as a possible substructure of the atom.
He imagined that, in the atom, one might have a number of polarized neutral
doublets with one corpuscle orbiting around each of the doublets. When light
 5.2 The early theory of the quantum 123

of a certain frequency traversed matter, only those corpuscles with frequencies

that resonated with that of the incident light would be released. That did not
mean that the rest of the corpuscles were not affected: the incident light would
twist their rotation movements around their doublet, but would not eject them
from their orbits, thus having no global effect.
In 1913, he proposed a more radical solution also relating the inner structure
of the atom to the challenges of quantum phenomena. In a series of lectures
at the Royal Institution early that year, he moved a step forward and argued
that ‘we cannot assume that the forces due to the charges of electricity inside
the atom are of exactly the same character as those given by the ordinary laws
of Electrostatics’ (Thomson, 1913a, p. 793). And he suggested that corpuscles
inside the atom were subject to two kinds of forces: an attractive one, propor-
tional to the square of the distance, and a repulsive one, proportional to the
cube of the distance. Capitalizing on his earlier suggestion that every corpuscle
was the origin of only one Faraday tube, he now assumed rather that each cor-
puscle was trapped in one tube of force, not entering ‘at this stage into any con-
sideration as to the origin of this force; we shall simply postulate its existence’
(p. 794). The atomic corpuscle could oscillate in the direction of the tube, but
needed a minimum amount of energy to move transversely and quit the tube.
This minimal energy would coincide with multiples of Planck’s constant. Once
again, his main point was to emphasize that one need not assume that ‘radiant
energy is molecular in structure’, but that the same results could be obtained ‘if
the mechanism in the atom by which the radiant energy is transformed to kin-
etic energy is such as to require the transference to the mechanism of a definite
amount of energy’ (p. 792). However, the mechanisms J. J. was putting forward
were more and more ad hoc and incapable of giving a consistent picture of the
structure of the atom.
Perhaps the clearest and most explicit attack on Planck’s theory was his
1912 communication in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, ‘The
unit theory of light’ (Thomson, 1912a). There, he tried to show that every single
phenomenon accounted for by the theory of the quantum, both in the absorp-
tion and the emission of radiation, could be equally explained by supposing
some intra-atomic mechanism in which there was a threshold energy for the
ejection of a corpuscle from an atom. That would explain why energy was
absorbed in apparently discrete units without having to assume that energy
had itself a molecular structure. While both theories were equally explana-
tory of the experimental data, Thomson’s was superior to Planck’s in that the
former preserved the continuity in optical phenomena, phenomena for which
the latter had no explanation, ‘and in the present state of the subject at any
rate is a hindrance and not a help’ (p. 643). Thomson could thus preserve the
124 Father and son. Old and new physics

undulatory aspects of radiation precisely because, even though internal mecha-

nisms in the atom produced discrete emission, these quanta were not essen-
tial and could, through their interaction with matter, be subdivided until they
approached a ‘nearly continuous’ distribution (p. 650).

5.3 Britain and the quanta in 1913

The best picture of the situation of quantum theory in Thomson’s and

many other British physicists’ minds in 1913 can be garnered from the British
Association meeting in Birmingham. James Jeans, who had recently converted
to the theory of the quantum and was one of only two British physicists present
at the 1911 Solvay meeting, took on the task of explaining and defending the
theory of the quantum to a reluctant audience. Jeans had been second wran-
gler in 1898, and he and G. H. Hardy were the first to attempt the Cambridge
Mathematical Tripos in only two years – and not in the usual three years – after
which he was appointed fellow and lecturer in Trinity College (Milne, 1952).
After graduating, he worked on radiation theory and statistical mechanics, pro-
ducing his first book, The Dynamical Theory of Gases (Jeans, 1904), and contributed
to the formulation of what we now call the Rayleigh–Jeans law for the distribu-
tion of radiation of a black body, which was derived using the equipartition of
energy. His consistent failure to describe the experimental energy distribution
of black-body radiation using classical arguments did not lead Jeans, at first, to
accept Planck’s hypothesis, but to search for alternative mechanisms to explain
the experimental law. Faithful to the equipartition principle, central in statis-
tical mechanics, Jeans was at first willing to challenge Planck’s law on the basis
that real, physical equilibrium was impossible in a black body. But, by 1910, he
had changed his mind, forced by the experimental success of Planck’s law as
well as by the theoretical proof that this law could be obtained only with the
assumption of quanta (Hudson, 1989). Another recent convert, Henri Poincaré,
also developed a very detailed demonstration of the sufficiency and necessity
of the hypothesis of quanta to obtain Planck’s law in 1912, just after the first
Solvay conference.
The discussions at the Birmingham meeting ‘made it abundantly clear that
the quantum-theory is far from being regarded as inevitable yet by many of the
English school of physicists’ (Jeans, 1914, p. 23), and when Jeans published his
Report on Radiation and the Quantum-Theory a few months later, he fairly included
full references to the criticisms by Thomson, Larmor, and others (Navarro, 2012).
Addressing Thomson’s most recent models, Jeans noted that his suggestion of
repulsive forces varying according to the law of the inverse cube ‘is not a condi-
tion which can be easily reconciled with what is known about the structure of
 5.3 Britain and the quanta in 1913 125

atoms and the motion of electrons’ (Jeans, 1914, p. 28). Furthermore, one could
not accept discreteness in the absorption and emission of radiation without
full commitment to what Jeans here called the ‘quantum-theory’ as the guiding
principle. This was precisely what J. J. and many others were still doing: accept-
ing a certain amount of phenomenological discreteness without embracing it as
a principle of nature or as an ultimate explanatory tool. Incidentally, the 1913
British Association meeting started with a presidential address given by Oliver
Lodge on ‘Continuity’, a manifesto in favour of the real existence of the ether
and its essentially continuous nature, and against the theories of relativity and
the quantum (Lodge, 1914). A generational gap was clearly opening up.
Jeans’ attitude, however, was also symptomatic of a particularly British way
of accepting the quantum theory. For him, the main problem was not that
the quantum theory was, so far, limited in its applicability, but that ‘even if
the complete set of equations were known, it might be no easy task to give a
physical interpretation of them, or to imagine the mechanism from which they ori-
ginate’ (Jeans, 1914, p. 79, my emphasis). I have emphasized the last sentence
because for him, as for most physicists of the Cambridge school, intelligibility
involved the possibility of imagining a mechanism, even if only heuristically,
that accounts for the observed phenomena. But when faced with the quantum,
any ‘attempt to imagine a universe in which action is atomic leads the mind
into a state of hopeless confusion’ (pp. 79–80).
The last chapter of the Report finishes with a discussion on the reality of the
ether, acknowledging that, in this respect, Continental and British physicists
fought on different – opposed – sides. Jeans seemed to cling to the reality of the
ether, but he relegated it to second place, the real stumbling block being the
contradiction between discrete and continuous theories, each valid for differ-
ent radiation phenomena. And, with this, the last pages of the book convey a
certain amount of pessimism for the status quo of physics. In a free translation
from Poincaré’s Dernière Pensées, he wrote:

It is impossible at present to predict the final issue. Will some entirely

different solution be found? Or will the advocates of the new theory
succeed in removing the obstacles which prevent us accepting it
without reserve? Is discontinuity destined to reign over the physical
universe, and will its triumph be final? Or will it finally be recognized
that this continuity is only apparent, and a disguise for a series of
continuous processes? … Any attempt at present to give a judgement on
these questions would be a waste of paper and ink (Jeans, 1914, p. 90).

While most of the Report was an active exercise in convincing the reader of
the inevitability of the quantum hypothesis and its successes, these last pages
126 Father and son. Old and new physics

brought that optimism back to the earth by pointing out the difficulties in
interpreting the quantum theory. But this was done in a particular way: these
last sentences can be interpreted as a way of encouraging British physicists
to embrace the theory without a priori rejecting it on the grounds that it was
not ‘physical’, i.e., mechanical. Furthermore, the fact that these considerations
appeared only at the end of the book, as a separate chapter, may indicate that,
from Jeans’ point of view, one could and should accept the quantum theory
without having a complete notion of its ultimate physical meaning. Partly fol-
lowing the problem-solving tradition of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos
pedagogy, Jeans was more concerned with proving that the quantum theory
solved specific problems than attempting an overall criqitue on metaphysical
grounds.

5.4 A father–son collaboration

Between 1901 and 1914, more than 200 researchers worked at the
Cavendish, producing almost 400 research papers (Kim, 2002, p. 164). Many of
these were the result of suggestions by Thomson to young scientists in search
of a research topic at the forefront of physics. In a way, J. J. partly turned the
Cavendish into an institution mass-producing results pertaining to all sorts
of radiation: monochromatic light, X-rays, radioactivity, photoelectricity, etc.
When J. J. had an idea about the nature of radiation, the process of ionization,
or a theory of conduction, he could easily find a research student eager to put
such idea to the test, enabling him to be very prolific in the production of an
ever-increasing number of theoretical models. Interestingly, however, J. J. him-
self performed almost no experiments related to the structure of light, X-rays
or gamma-rays. His personal experimental project continued to be positive rays
throughout, from 1910, with the collaboration of the new research assistant at
the Cavendish, Francis Aston, and from 1913, with his son G. P.
J. J.’s work on positive rays had, by 1910, come to a standstill. His experi-
mental set-up was too sensitive to changes in physical variables, especially
at low pressures, and his results were so full of errors that no consistent
theory could be developed. As we saw in the previous chapter, there was no
way to decide if the primary emission during ionization consisted of posi-
tive rays or his supposed neutral doublets. Moreover, the research student
with whom he had worked on this topic since 1907, George Kaye, left for
the National Physical Laboratory. Francis Aston, who had studied chemistry
and physics in Birmingham under Poynting, and then became a researcher
at that university, filled the position. Unlike J. J., Aston was a highly skilled
experimentalist, dexterous in glass blowing, and always eager for better and
 5.4 A father–son collaboration 127

more accurate experimental results. Aston’s arrival brought about a change

in the pace and the overall aim of J. J.’s project on positive rays (Hughes,
2003, 2009).
Aston suggested that, in order to get controllable discharges and, conse-
quently, accurate results at low pressures, they should work with larger ves-
sels, following an idea that J. J. himself had suggested long before in his Notes
on Recent Researches but never implemented (Thomson, 1893, p. 90). This modi-
fication, with bulbs of up to eleven-litre capacity, dramatically changed the
results at low pressures: ‘phases of the phenomena of the positive rays come
to light which are absent or inconspicuous at higher pressures’ (Thomson,
1910c, p. 752). He could now clearly observe on the screen the characteristic
parabolas for each gas contained in the tube: each parabola corresponded to
a particular charge-to-mass ratio, as he had predicted in 1907. Another radi-
cal change came with the use of photographic plates rather than a willemite
fluorescent screen to record the parabolas. And they also managed to get a
better vacuum pump for the deflection tube, so as to minimize the neutral-
ization process. With these changes and the new results, he abandoned the
idea that neutral doublets might be at the origin of the emission of positive
rays, and he slowly came to the realization that his ubiquitous H+ was due to
hydrogen contamination and not to the supposed existence of a fundamental
unit of positive electrification. But instead of explicitly admitting the experi-
mental error, J. J. avoided any mention of it, took what could be saved, and
turned his research on positive rays into a totally different project (Falconer,
1988, p. 303).
Already in the first paper he published after these modifications were imple-
mented, in September 1910, he suggested a possible use for this new technique:
‘I think this effect may furnish a valuable means of analysing the gases in the
tube and determining their atomic weight’ (Thomson, 1910c, p. 758). And after
a few months’ work, this turned into the main goal of his research on positive
rays, as the title of his public lecture at the Royal Institution, in April 1911,
makes clear: ‘A new method of chemical analysis’ (Thomson, 1911). The parab-
ola method would constitute an alternative method to spectroscopic chemical
analysis, one that ‘is even more delicate than that of spectrum analysis, for
by it we can detect the presence of quantities of a foreign gas too minute to
produce any indication in the spectroscope’ (p. 3). Other benefits of this young
‘but sufficiently developed’ method over spectroscopy included the very small
quantity of material needed for a complete chemical analysis (no more than
1/100 of a milligram), and more importantly, the fact that it could not only
identify new elements or new ionic forms of a given substance but also give
their atomic mass without further analysis, since each positive element would
128 Father and son. Old and new physics

(a) (b)

Figure 5.1. Images of the parabolas obtained for (a) nitrogen and (b) carbon
monoxide (Thomson, 1911, figures 1 and 3). Courtesy: Royal Institution of Great
Britain.

give a separate parabola. Finally, one need not have a pure substance in order
to analyse its constitution, since any impurity would trace out an altogether
different parabola. And, by way of illustration, he showed some of the clearest
pictures he had so far obtained (Figure 5.1).
His papers from 1910 onwards contain systematic lists of observed atoms
and molecules, many of which had never been isolated. Thus, for instance, J. J.
obtained evidence for the carbon radicals CH, CH2, and CH3. He also began to
detect multiply charged ions, the most striking example being mercury, which
was present with one, two, three, … and up to eight units of electricity. That
posed a new problem that led him to modify his views on the production of
positive rays. So far, J. J. had largely thought that positive rays were the result of
ionization: cathode rays in the ionization tube would collide with the molecules
of the gas, trigger the release of one corpuscle, and leave a positively charged
ion of the gas in the tube. That explanation was plausible for singly charged,
or perhaps even for doubly charged ions, but it seemed totally implausible for
higher charges like the ones he was now obtaining. His suggestion was that
‘in the discharge-tube there are two, and only two, kinds of ionization; in one
 5.4 A father–son collaboration 129

of these kinds the mercury atom loses 1 corpuscle, while in the other kind
it loses 8’ (Thomson, 1912c, p. 670). Atoms from the second ionization could
regain a few corpuscles, thus giving rise to the whole range of ions as second-
ary phenomena. The important thing here was that, for the first time since the
discovery of the corpuscle, J. J. thought of an ionization process not caused by
them. In the first ionization, the fast corpuscles from cathode rays ‘penetrate
into the atom and come into collision with the corpuscles inside it individually,
the collision in favourable cases causing the corpuscle struck to escape from
the atom’. In the second case, however, ‘we suppose that the mercury atom is
struck by a rapidly moving atom and not by a corpuscle; after the collision the
mercury atom starts off with a very considerable velocity, which at first is not
shared by the corpuscles inside it’. As a result, ‘if there were eight corpuscles
in the mercury atom connected with about the same firmness to the atom, the
result … might be the detachment of the set of eight leaving the atom with a
charge of 8 units of positive electricity’ (p. 671).
J. J. extended his dual method of ionization to all elements, since he had seen
ions of one and two charges in most elements, with the exception of hydrogen
that was only present in the H+ form. For the rest, he now inferred that the
doubly charged ion was always the result of atomic collisions, and not, as pre-
viously thought, due to the collision of corpuscles with the atom. And as sup-
porting evidence, he mentioned the case of helium and its relationship with
the alpha particles from radioactivity: ‘in the vacuum-tube the helium atom
occurs with both single and double charges, whilst as an α particle it always
seems to have two charges, suggesting that the process by which the α par-
ticle acquires its charge is analogous to the process by which multiply-charged
atoms are produced in the discharge-tube’ (Thomson, 1912c, p. 672). With this,
he related the formation of multiply charged ions to the emission of alpha par-
ticles in radioactive materials, but, more importantly, he was slowly giving a
new status to the positive part of the atom as a substantial unit that could have
an independent life without all its valence corpuscles. As we saw in Section 5.2
above, his 1913 paper ‘On the structure of the atom’ indirectly contains the idea
of a unit of positive electrification in the centre of the atom, with the external
corpuscles linked to it by the mediation of Faraday tubes through which radial
attractive and repulsive forces are transmitted.2
But perhaps the result that fascinated him most was the detection ‘of
some compounds that have not hitherto been detected by chemical methods’

2
I say indirectly because in that paper, as in many other contributions around those
years, the emphasis was on the forces that act upon the corpuscles rather than the over-
all structure of the atom.
130 Father and son. Old and new physics

(Thomson, 1912b, p. 240). His favourite and, so he thought, most relevant dis-
covery was that of what he called X3, an atom with a charge-to-mass ratio three
times that of H+. This ratio could be due to a carbon atom with four charges
or to a singly charged molecule containing three hydrogen atoms. Since this
parabola was obtained in experimental situations free from the presence of
any carbon compound, J. J. decided that it had to be the new H3+ molecule,
even though systematic analysis of the new substance gave no clear results. As
Falconer convincingly demonstrated, this interpretation was very appealing in
the context of atomic structure (Falconer, 1988, pp. 305–7): around 1913, J. J.
was toying with the idea that the core of the atom increased in units of four,
i.e., by addition of alpha particles, which would explain why positive radioactiv-
ity was emitted only in these units. In his usual loose manner, he started from
the fact that all atoms up to mass 40, except, of course, hydrogen, seemed to fall
into the series 4n or 4n + 3 (a fact, that by the way, was not true for beryllium or
nitrogen). In this case, H3 might prove to be the first element in the second ser-
ies. Less appealing, for him was, a new parabola associated with atomic weight
22 associated Ne20, and which he explained away as possibly due to the ion
NeH2+. It was Aston who focused on this latter line after being awarded the
Maxwell scholarship in 1913, thus obtaining intellectual independence from
J. J. The story continues with Aston’s interpretation of this line as an isotope of
neon, the first non-radioactive isotope to be discovered in the laboratory, and
the first of a series of achievements with his modified experimental device: the
mass spectrograph (Falconer, 1988; Hughes, 2003, 2009). J. J.’s researches with
positive rays continued now with his son as collaborator.
In the summer of 1913, G. P. Thomson graduated and decided to start
research work at the Cavendish, after being offered a research fellowship at
Corpus Christi College. Wanting to pursue a scientific career, he needed to find
a topic to develop as his own research and a place to work on it. His decision
can be seen as slightly conservative: to stay in the family, at the Cavendish,
with his father as supervisor. This choice, although not unusual, and certainly
not a bad one, deserves some reflection. In 1913, the Cavendish was no longer
the only vibrant place for physics in Britain as it had certainly been ten years
earlier: while, in the early 1900s, the Cavendish was virtually the only des-
tination for 1851 Exhibition Scholars, in the early 1910s, an increasing num-
ber of them decided to move to other British research centres (Kim, 2002, pp.
169–74). New laboratories, such as those in Manchester and Leeds, had become
established, with research programmes more on the cutting edge of science
(Hughes, 2005). Perhaps the best-known example of disappointment with the
Cavendish was Niels Bohr. Full of energy and with his recent Ph.D. dissertation
on a theory of electrons, Bohr was eager to meet Thomson as the father figure
 5.4 A father–son collaboration 131

of the electron, only to find a person doing experiments in the same old way
that 15 years earlier had led him to the formulation of the corpuscle hypoth-
esis, and quite reluctant to introduce conceptual changes into his world-view.
Bohr decided to move to Manchester, where he eventually developed his quan-
tum model of the atom.
If those from outside Cambridge were starting to look at other possible loca-
tions to do their research, some Cambridge graduates were doing the same.
C. G. Darwin, a life-long friend of G. P. Thomson and, like him, born and raised
in that provincial town, decided to move to Manchester, aware of the subtle,
but increasing, limitations of the Cavendish (G. P. Thomson, 1963). Another
example was William Bragg, who had graduated in 1912 and started his own
X-ray research project and who considered the laboratory a ‘sad place’ (Hunter,
2004, p. 21). With this, I want to illustrate that the Cavendish was certainly not
the only possible exciting destination for a Cambridge graduate of G. P.’s gener-
ation, which may lead us to infer that he considered it a positive thing to stay
intellectually close to his father.
The status quo of positive-ray research at the time G. P. joined his father
is reflected in the book Rays of Positive Electricity and their Application to Chemical
Analysis that J. J. published in 1913, and which contains basically the work
already published in previous papers. In putting this book together, J. J. wanted
to promote his method of analysis using positive rays to other physicists and
chemists: ‘I feel sure that there are many problems in Chemistry which could
be solved with far greater ease by this than by any other method’ (Thomson,
1913b). These were the discovery of new substances and transitory combin-
ations (like his finding of previously unknown radicals), the immediate deter-
mination of whether a substance was diatomic or monatomic (the former
giving two parabolas, the latter only one), the measurement of the proportions
of different substances in a mixed gas, or the possibility of different electrifica-
tions of a given substance. Furthermore, he thought that much of the informa-
tion he was accumulating through his work on positive rays was relevant to
understanding the problem of chemical bonding, which we shall consider in
the last section of this chapter.
As we shall see in the next section, war broke out in 1914 and the paths of J. J.
and G. P. Thomson, father and son, went in different directions. G. P., like most
young British scientists, enlisted as an ordinary soldier. After a few months in
France, he was sent back to England, to work as a scientist at the Royal Aircraft
Factory on problems concerning aerodynamics and the building of aeroplanes.
This provided him with the possibility of developing that aspect of physics that
had, as a child, triggered his interest in science, as well as removing him from
the theoretical world of Cambridge and the research projects of the Cavendish.
132 Father and son. Old and new physics

The thorough knowledge of aerodynamics he acquired during the war resulted

in a book on the subject written in 1919 (G.P. Thomson, 1920a).
As the war came to an end, J. J. became Master of Trinity College, and agreed
to resign from his position as director of the Cavendish, a position to which
Rutherford was appointed, bringing with him the school of radioactive research
he had built in Manchester (Wilson, 1983, pp. 406–13). In spite of all these
changes, when the war ended, G. P. decided to continue the research project on
positive rays with his father. Later in life, G. P. justified this move, saying that
‘the positive ray … was a very big thing in the Cavendish’ (G. P. Thomson, AHQP,
T2, 2, 12). It was certainly a ‘big thing’ for his father who, in 1920, was prepar-
ing a secondly highly revised, edition of his book on positive rays. And it was a
‘big thing’ in the mind of Aston who, while also working on the construction
of aeroplanes in Farnborough during the war, was struggling to understand his
experimental results in terms of isotopes, an interpretation totally different to
the one J. J. was giving. A quick survey of the publications in scientific journals
in the 1910s and 1920s, however, disproves G. P.’s statement on the scope of
positive-rays research. There are only a handful of papers from other scientists
following Thomson’s path on positive rays.
In J. J.’s mind, Aston’s developments were only ‘the beginning of a harvest
of results which will elucidate the process of chemical combination, and thus
bridge over the most serious gap which at present exists between Physics and
Chemistry’ (Thomson, 1913b, preface to the second edition of 1921). He was
determined to use research on positive rays as an alternative method of study-
ing the composition and structure of the atoms by analysing the proportion
and behaviour of positively charged ions – the charge of these, acquired by
losing a certain number of electrons, would give information about the most
likely arrangement of corpuscles in the atom – and G. P. eventually became
his main supporter in this project. It was in the field of positive rays that
G. P. centred his research and published his first experimental papers after the
Great War (G. P. Thomson, 1920b, c, 1921, 1922).

5.5 Physics at war

As already mentioned, G. P. had early been involved in the war effort,

first in the British rearguard, and from March 1915, in Farnborough, working
for the Royal Aircraft Factory. By then, other Cavendish researchers like Aston
and G. I. Taylor had joined the team assigned the task of improving the theor-
etical and practical understanding of the dynamics of air-flow: ‘Aerodynamics
was in an odd state in 1915’ G. P. wrote in his memoirs. ‘There was very little
valid theory, for the classical hydrodynamics of Euler gives absurd answers,
 5.5 Physics at war 133

in all but a few cases, for the forces exerted by the air on bodies moving
through it’ (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 41). This work on aerodynamics resonated
with at least two of G. P.’s main interests: his passion for sailing and model
building, and his Cambridge training, in which mastery of the mathematical
methods for dealing with the continuum was essential. His research activity
in Farnborough involved first flying in planes with equipment and prototype
pieces to control, and later learning how to fly. The latter was, in those con-
ditions, a dangerous activity, since the instructors were ‘not good’, and ‘the
death rate among pupils was high … it about equalled that at the battle of
Waterloo’ (p. 44). His engagement with the Royal Aircraft Factory also involved
a few months’ work in the USA.
J. J., on the other hand, stayed mainly in Cambridge and became involved in
the war effort more as an administrator than as an active researcher through
his two appointments at the time: his presidency of the Royal Society and his
vice-presidency of the Board for Invention and Research. These two positions
gave him the opportunity to speak up on two issues on which he had strong
opinions: his views on the relationship between science, the military and
industry, and his ideas on education. In both areas, J. J. saw the need for much
reform in Britain and he used his high-profile positions during the war to lobby
for them.
Britain received a big shock during the Great War. It was apparent that the
enemy forces were far ahead in terms of scientifically led and industrially devel-
oped weaponry. Classical gentlemanly fighting was over and a new kind of war
was taking place, in which new, large-scale, scientifically produced weapons
seemed to be determining the outcome of the war. The ability to produce new
arms, both for defence and attack, depended on the joint work of scientists and
the military on an industrial scale. The Royal Society, and Thomson with it, con-
tributed to the new circumstances, since most active scientists were engaged
in war-related work, thus giving ‘striking evidence of the extent to which even
the most recondite branches of science can find application in modern warfare’
(Thomson, 1917, p. 93).
According to J. J., the war impetus had to help Britain gain momentum and
make this collaboration a long-lasting one, encouraging the creation of a ‘per-
manent establishment of both the Army and the Navy, special laboratories,
properly equipped and in close touch with the services, whose work should
be the discovery and development of applications of Physical, Chemical and
Engineering Science for Military and Naval purposes’ (Thomson, 1917, p. 94).
This scheme resulted in the establishment of the Department for Scientific and
Industrial Research (DSIR) in 1915 and its redesignation and enlargement once
the war was over. Thomson’s rhetoric advocated deeper integration of science,
134 Father and son. Old and new physics

the military and industry, which was necessary in order to turn Britain into
a powerful country, not only during the war but also in peacetime, since the
power of a country needed also to be shown in the commercial arena and the
provision of goods for its citizens. Britain could not base its strength on trading
alone, but must also include production, since ‘we have been taught by bitter
experience that it is not safe to have regard to nothing but money profit in
developing the industries of the country’. Relying on his own experience as the
director of the Cavendish, Thomson was aware of the increasing amounts of
money needed to undertake large-scale research, and the reluctance to invest
in undertakings of doubtful and, certainly not immediate, economic return.
That is why he proposed that the companies of one particular industrial sector
should unite and create research institutions that would benefit all the com-
panies in that sector. In his advocacy for more organized practical research,
however, Thomson was concerned that industrial research should not be pro-
moted to the detriment of pure science, since he believed in a top-down, one-
way, linear relationship between pure and applied science:

We must be careful, however, and I think this might be regarded by

the Royal Society as one of its most important duties, that the badly
needed increase in research in applied science is not accompanied by
any slackening off in research in pure science, that is, research made
without the idea of commercial application, but solely with the view
of increasing our knowledge of the laws of nature. Even from the
crudest utilitarian point of view, nothing could be more foolish than
the neglect of pure science, for most of the great changes that have
revolutionized or created great industries have come from discoveries
made without any thought of their practical application (Thomson,
1917, p. 95).

This was not just opportunistic talk during the wartime emergency. In fact, J. J.
repeated this discourse on many occasions, even after the war. As president of
the newly created Institute of Physics, for instance, in 1923 Thomson promoted
a series of lectures dedicated to the application of physics to industry. In the
foreword to the publication containing these lectures, he praised the recent
growth in the number of research laboratories and institutes started ‘either by
individual firms or, under the auspices of the Advisory Council for Scientific
and Industrial Research, by combinations of firms’, as a first step towards the
implementation of this new strategy. The country was in a process of recon-
struction after the war, and this needed ‘increased production and increased
opportunities of employment, such as would be afforded by the foundation of
new industries … To judge from the experience of the past no method is more
 5.5 Physics at war 135

likely to lead to this result than the industrial applications of physical science
and research in physics’ (Thomson, 1923b, foreword).
Also in that year, during his third trip to the USA, Thomson was greatly
impressed by the research facilities he saw there. Invited by the Franklin
Institute of Philadelphia, Thomson gave a series of lectures about which we
shall speak in the next section, but he also visited a number of laboratories,
such as those of General Electric and the Bell Telephone Company, where he
had first-hand experience of the benefits of such large-scale scientific and indus-
trial endeavours. In comparison with the USA, however, Britain had a better
record in scientific research at the universities, and that moved J. J. to advocate
a closer and symbiotic relationship between industry and academia, arguing
that fundamental discoveries from the latter were beneficial to the former and,
as a consequence, industry should also sponsor the work in the universities.
On many occasions thereafter, he used his discovery of the electron as a clear
example of the use of apparently useless academic findings in the development
of new commodities:

One of the most remarkable things about Modern Physics is that

though it deals with the most recondite of phenomena, few branches
have led to such important practical applications. Could anything
seem at first sight less likely to be of practical utility than the
electron – yet it is now the foundation of a great industry employing
many men and much capital. It is the electron that makes long-
distance wireless possible, and enables one human being to instruct,
amuse or bore another at a range of thousands of miles [referring
to the radio] … These discoveries were made without any thought
of such applications, they illustrate the value of research made only
for the purpose of advancing knowledge. It is discoveries made
in this way that create new industries and revolutionise old ones.
These applications of pure science to industries benefit not only the
industries but also science itself. For when a discovery is seen to have
practical applications and is taken up by the engineers it can by the
resources and powerful appliance at their disposal be developed at
a rate and on a scale impossible in the Laboratory, and so science
advances more quickly. The Industries thus repay the debt they owe
to Science, and unite with it in the task of increasing our knowledge
of the wonderful universe in which we live (Thomson, 1930, p. 211).

Together with industrial research, Thomson became actively engaged in edu-

cational reforms during the war, with a particular emphasis on improving
the teaching of the sciences. As a matter of fact, the Royal Society had been
136 Father and son. Old and new physics

pushing for an increase and improvement in science education during the ten-
ures of Thomson’s predecessors as presidents, Archibald Geikie and William
Crookes. A country like Britain could not take off scientifically and techno-
logically if the most able students in the schools received minimal training
in the sciences compared with their education in English, literature and the
classics, including a certain mastery of Latin and Greek. If the power of the
country was to be developed in its research institutions, there was a need for
scientifically trained personnel, and this meant long-term education in the
sciences from an early age. The main reason for encouraging the teaching
of sciences in the elementary and secondary school was to prevent suitable
candidates ‘drifting into employment of secondary importance to the State’
(Thomson, 1917, p. 96).
It can be argued that Thomson’s position in this debate was not easy. On the
one hand, he was by now an established Cambridge don, embedded in all the
traditions of that university. But, as he had experienced in the 1880s and 1890s,
during his attempts to reform the science triposes in Cambridge, an emphasis
on science education to the detriment of the arts would be regarded with suspi-
cion by some classically educated dons. That is why he had to measure carefully
the arguments he used, distancing himself from the political left in his defence
of scientific teaching. His 1917 address as President of the Royal Society is a
good example of this kind of rhetorical delicacy:

The need for a greater appreciation of the value of science has

been brought into such prominence by the war that most of those
who have advocated the claims of science in education have not
unnaturally laid the greatest stress on the importance of science
to the welfare, the power, and even the safety, of the nation.
The supporters of literary studies have, on the other hand, dwelt
mainly on the fact that literature broadens a man’s horizon, and
gives him new interests and pleasures, that it teaches him how to
live, if not how to make a living. The result of this divergence of
appeal has made the discussion appear … almost like a discussion
between Spirituality and Materialism, or between a saint and a man
of business… I must protest against the idea that literature has a
monopoly in the mental development of the individual. The study
of science widens the horizon of his intellectual activities, and
helps him to appreciate the beauty and mystery which surround
him. It opens up avenues of constant appeal to his intellect, to his
imagination, to his spirit of inquiry, to his love for truth. So far
from being entirely utilitarian, it often lends romance and interest
 5.6 The electron in chemistry 137

to things which to those ignorant of science make no appeal to

the intellect or imagination, but are regarded by them from an
exclusively utilitarian point of view (Thomson, 1918, p. 186).

In those years, Thomson was not only making grandiose speeches like this one,
but was also actively taking part in the partly failed reform of the educational
system that Herbert Fisher, director of the Board of Education, attempted in
1917. In 1916, Thomson was appointed, by the Prime Minister, chairman of
a committee to investigate the position of the natural sciences in the educa-
tional system, as part of the whole process being coordinated by Fisher. The
Fisher Report was a milestone in the history of education in Britain: it famously
included the extension of compulsory school education until the age of 14, and
suggested the implementation of an educational system, both at primary and
secondary levels, by which access to education depended on intellectual cap-
acity only and not on social or economic status.

5.6 The electron in chemistry

In Chapter 2, we discussed J. J.’s early interest in merging physics and

chemistry under the umbrella of the physical sciences, both at a conceptual and
an institutional level. The latter project never eventuated, but, throughout
his career, he kept an eye on the conceptual and theoretical rapprochement.
His own research more often than not stepped into the territory of chemis-
try, especially chemical bonding in molecules (Stranges, 1982; Sinclair, 1987;
Chayut, 1991). The problem of the nature of chemical bonding emerged in all
his atomic models, starting with his early vortex ring model, where the bonds
of affinity were related to the stable dynamical configurations of the rings.
From 1891 onwards, the paradigm of electrolysis that permeated his research
on discharge tubes introduced the notion of electrically polarized atoms and
the possibility that chemical bonding was directly related to electrical forces.
Once the electron-corpuscle came on the stage as part of the structure of all
atoms, J. J. turned it also into a very promising tool to explain, at least in part,
the mechanism of chemical bonding.
The appropriation of the electron by the chemists was not, however, straight-
forward; in 1903, during his lectures in Yale, Thomson expressed regret that,
although the idea that the chemical forces were of electrical origin had had
many supporters (from Davy and Faraday, to Berzelius and Helmholtz), ‘chem-
ists seem, however, to have made but little use of this idea, having apparently
found the conception of “bonds of affinity” more fruitful’ (Thomson, 1904a,
p. 133). Twenty years later, in 1923, Thomson was back in America, delivering
138 Father and son. Old and new physics

a series of lectures at the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, immediately to

be published as The Electron in Chemistry. In between, a generation of American
chemists had taken seriously much of Thomson’s theoretical chemistry and
developed the foundations of a theory of bonding based on the electronic atomic
structure, often quoting J. J. Thomson as the originator of such an approach.3
From the very beginning, J. J.’s models of the atom were closely linked to the
question of chemical bonding. The arrangement of the corpuscles in different
layers, with a maximum in each layer, was related to the periodicity of chem-
ical properties reflected in Avogadro’s system. Atoms tended to stability, and
this might explain the ease with which they gained or lost external corpuscles
in the presence of other atoms, which, in turn, would enable an electrostatic
bond between the oppositely charged atoms. As we saw in the previous chapter,
this idea reinforced his faith in the reality of Faraday tubes, since these might
be the physical counterpart of the lines used by chemists to represent the struc-
ture of chemical formulae. In his widely read 1907 book, J. J. ruled out the exist-
ence of other kinds of mechanism for chemical bonding, even though he had
to leave many compounds, including most organic substances, unexplained. In
Arabatzis’ words, ‘in the second decade of the twentieth century, because of the
popularity of Thomson’s theory among American chemists, the exclusive real-
ity of polar bonds became part of the orthodoxy of the day’ (Arabatzis, 2006,
p. 181 see also Chayut, 1991).
But, just before the war started, and moved by the evidence from his experi-
ments on positive rays, J. J. changed his mind and began to talk about two types
of chemical bonding: one polar and the other non-polar. The argument for the
latter was the following. There were quite a number of molecules, like H2 or
CO, in which, after dissociation in the cathode, he could observe parabolas of
equal intensity corresponding to the two component elements on both the
positive and the negative side. This symmetry should mean that, before the
splitting, the two atoms in the molecule could not have opposite charges and
that their bond was not polar. He had not drawn this conclusion by the time of
the first edition of Rays of Positive Electricity, but made it the topic of a paper in
Philosophical Magazine only in 1914.
The analogy he used in this paper to justify the existence of chemical bond-
ing without the need for total ionization of its component atoms was the
existence of physical properties like ‘intrinsic pressure and surface tension of
liquids, latent heat of evaporation, cohesion of solids and liquids, the rigidity of

3
According to Chayut (1991, p. 541) these were: George Falk, John M. Nelson, Hal T. Beans,
Harry S. Fry, Lauder W. Jones, William A. Noyes, Julius Stieglitz, William Bray, Gerald
Branch, S. J. Bates, E. C Baly, C. H. Desch, G. N. Lewis, and Irving Langmuir.
 5.6 The electron in chemistry 139

solids, and so on’ (Thomson, 1914, p. 757). These would be the result of forces
between neutral molecules stemming from the organisation of the electrical
charges in their interior. Analogously, one could imagine chemical bonding as
the result of the organization of corpuscles inside the atom without the need
to lose or gain any number of them. The key to this new type of bonding was
two-fold: the tendency of all atoms towards ‘saturation’ and the existence of
Faraday tubes. According to J. J., the former was achieved when the atom had
eight corpuscles in the outmost layer. In that case, corpuscles were fixed in
their positions. When their number was less than the maximum eight, corpus-
cles were mobile inside the atom, a mobility that was only limited by the fact
that every corpuscle was linked to the positive part of the atom – which he
by now accepted occupied a central position in the atom – by a Faraday tube.
This allowed for the possibility of a particular corpuscle gaining stability, not
by abandoning the atom, but by having its Faraday tube ending in the positive
part of another nearby atom:

Now let us consider how the corpuscles in these atoms can be fixed.
They are not fixed when the atom is by itself. In this case the tube
of force starting from a corpuscle in the atom, returns to a positive
charge in the same atom and possesses considerable mobility, as
the corpuscle at one end of it can move freely about in the atom.
The corpuscle will not be fixed unless the tube of force at its end is
anchored to something not in the atom, i.e. it must end on another
atom. Thus if there are n free corpuscles in the atom, to fix these and
thus saturate the atom, the n tubes of force which start from the n
corpuscles must all end on other atoms and not return to the original
atom. Thus to ensure saturation from every free corpuscle in an atom,
a tube of force must pass out of that atom and end on some other,
and this must hold for every atom in the molecule. When the atoms
are electrically neutral, i.e. have no excess of positive over negative
charge or vice-versa, for each tube of force which passes out of an
atom, another must come in; and thus each atom containing
n corpuscles must be the origin of n tubes going to other atoms and
also the termination of n tubes coming from other atoms (Thomson,
1914, p. 782).

As was often the case, J. J. did not explain the mechanism by which this dis-
location of the Faraday tubes might take place, but he merely emphasized the
explanatory power of this model for a large number of molecules, especially
organic compounds. The first example he used to illustrate this new bonding
was, however, his recently ‘discovered’ X3 molecule, which he had interpreted
140 Father and son. Old and new physics

as corresponding to H3. In this new model, this molecule was possible if each
H atom was the origin of a Faraday tube going to a second H atom but receiving
a tube from the third atom, creating a sort of triangular structure. The import-
ance of this new idea resides in the fact that this new theory of J. J. Thomson
of chemical bonding was one of the main catalysts for the American chemist
Gilbert N. Lewis to formulate his theory of chemical bonding based on the shar-
ing of two electrons by two atoms in 1916 (Kohler, 1971), which was generally
accepted by the community of physical chemists by the time of Thomson’s
third visit to the USA in 1923.
Lewis trained in chemistry at Harvard at the end of the nineteenth century.
These were the years of the emergence of physical chemistry with the ionic
theory of Svante Arrhenius, and, like many people of his generation, he spent
the usual postdoctoral year in Germany, with Ostwald and Nernst. Back in the
USA, he took the position of instructor first at Harvard, and from 1905 at the
MIT, and began to think, teach and speak (but not to publish) about the elec-
tron theory of chemical valence. His main image was that of a cubic atom, with
the eight saturation electrons occupying the vertices of the cube. At the time,
Thomson and most physicists were concerned with the stability of moving elec-
trons in atoms due to radiation, but that was not a main issue for chemists.
Their real interest was in the stability of chemical compounds, and they tended
to picture electrons in fixed positions and imagine the relocation of electrons
to create polar bonds.
With Thomson’s legitimization of non-polar bonds from 1914, the critical
voices against the exclusivity of the polar bond gained momentum, culmin-
ating in Lewis’ seminal 1916 paper ‘The atom and the molecule’, in which he
introduced the notion of ‘electron-sharing’ within his cubic structure of the
atom. His idea was that atoms could share electrons by being close enough
so as to have one or more electrons occupying a position in the external elec-
tronic layer of both atoms. The contemporary reader may be surprised that
this static model was proposed at a time when Bohr had already introduced
his quantum atom. Lewis mentioned it in this paper but dismissed it, together
with any other planetary model, on the basis that it ‘is inadequate to explain
even the simplest chemical properties of the atom’ (Lewis, 1916, p. 773) and
that it was only an attempt, and a failed one according to Lewis, to account for
electromagnetic problems of stability. Furthermore, the paper contains a kind
of manifesto that resonates with Thomson’s methodology:

Indeed it seems hardly likely that much progress can be made in the
solution of the difficult problems relating to chemical combination
by assigning in advance definite laws of force between the positive
 5.6 The electron in chemistry 141

and negative constituents of an atom, and then on the basis of these

laws building up mechanical models of the atom. We must first of
all, from a study of chemical phenomena, learn the structure and the
arrangement of the atoms, and if we find it necessary to alter the law
of force acting between charged particles at small distance (Lewis,
1916, p. 773).

Lewis’ model and its subsequent modifications became very popular among
chemists during and immediately after the Great War. The static atom (not
necessarily cubic) not only gave a reasonable explanation of chemical bond-
ing, but also seemed to receive support from early X-ray diffraction in metals
(Stranges, 1982, chapter 8). Two post-war papers by Thomson also supported
the idea of a static atom rather than a dynamic one à la Bohr (Thomson, 1919,
1920). While physicists, especially in Europe, increasingly regarded J. J. as a
relic from old times gone by, he was regarded as a kind of foundational father
of the new chemistry of valence, especially in America. There, he had his tri-
umphant 1923 trip, visiting and lecturing at universities on the East Coast as
well as major industrial research laboratories like General Electric’s facilities in
Schenectady, where he met chemists such as Irvin Langmuir and Albert Hull,
both key players in the development of Lewis’ ideas.
The Electron in Chemistry is a five-chapter book that situates Thomson’s car-
eer at the centre of the current status of chemistry (Thomson, 1923a). He was
father of the two main scientific developments that had finally shattered the
division between physics and chemistry: the electron and the study of positive
rays provided information about the structure of the atom and, with it, a radi-
cal change in chemists’ understanding of previously purely phenomenological
concepts like affinity. If Thomson’s view of chemistry was, in the 1880s, that
it was an under-age science just beginning to acquire some epistemological
maturity, this book has a celebratory flavour to it: chemistry was, at last, a
grown-up science, thanks to the input from physics, the most important of
which were his. This triumphalism is clear in the preface of the book:

It has been customary to divide the study of the properties of matter

into two sciences, physics and chemistry. In the past the distinction
was a real one owing to our ignorance of the structures of the atom
and the molecule. The region inside the atom or molecule was an
unknown territory in the older physics, which had no explanation
to offer as to why the properties of an atom of one element differed
from those of another element. As chemistry is concerned mainly
with these differences there was a real division between the two
sciences.
142 Father and son. Old and new physics

In the course of the last quarter of a century, however, the

physicists have penetrated into this territory and have arrived at
conceptions of the atom and molecule which indicate the way in
which one kind of atom differs from another and how one atom
unites with others to form molecules. These are just the problems
which are dealt with by chemists and thus if the modern conception
of the atom is correct the barrier which separated physics from
chemistry has been removed.
From many points of view the chemical side seems to be the one
on which the most striking developments of the newer physics may
be expected (Thomson, 1923a, preface).

Not surprisingly, J. J. used his particular pedagogical style, stressing the achieve-
ments of his atomic and molecular model, and avoiding what his static model
of the atom could not explain. If, for instance, Lockyer’s spectroscopic experi-
ments had been a support for his 1897 suggestion of a subatomic particle, now,
in 1923, there was no mention of the very complicated spectroscopic phenom-
ena for which a static model of the atom could not account. Quantum theory
was, of course, totally absent, as was any reference to Bohr and Sommerfeld,
or even to Rutherford’s 1919 demonstration of the existence of the proton. For
Thomson, the main source of information about the positive part of the atom
was his work on positive rays which showed that ‘the carrier of the positive
charge, unlike that of the negative, varies from element to element’, only to
concede that ‘as the mass of the positive charge is always an integral multiple
of a unit, it is natural to suppose that this mass is made up of a number of units
bound together’ (Thomson, 1923a, p. 2).
To be sure, 1923 was also the year of the publication of Lewis’ book Valence
and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules, which not only fixed the main con-
cepts in the discussion of non-polar atomic bonding, but also introduced a
first rapprochement between the Thomson–Lewis static ideas and the Bohr–
Sommerfeld dynamic atom, considering the now three-dimensional orbits
as static, irrespective of the actual position of the electron within the orbit.
And soon afterwards, the whole new field of quantum chemistry finally set
aside the fundamental tenets of J. J. and his classical approach to physics
(Gavroglu & Simoes, 2000; Gavroglu, 2001). Were it not for the events we
shall explore in the next chapter, the 1923 trip might well have turned into
Thomson’s swan-song.
 6

The electron in Aberdeen:

from particle to wave

6.1 Professorship in Aberdeen

On 13 June 1922, the Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University

of Aberdeen, Charles Niven, retired, vacating the chair that Maxwell himself had
occupied some decades earlier. Niven, together with his elder brother William,
and Horace Lamb, formed ‘the first generation of Cambridge Maxwellians’
(Warwick, 2003a, p. 325–33). Graduating as senior wrangler in the Cambridge
Mathematical Tripos in 1867, Charles Niven had made important early contri-
butions to the understanding of Maxwell’s Treatise, showing that ‘it was the
direct application of the new equations to problems in electrostatics and, espe-
cially, electrical currents that they identified as the obvious avenue of research’
(p. 329), and not the dynamic foundation of the theory. But, by 1922, it had
been a long time since he had done any relevant scientific research and his
resignation was awaited with anticipation.
G. P. Thomson applied for this position. The testimonials he enclosed with
the application letter, nine in total, all came from well-established scholars
directly related to Cambridge: E. C. Pearce, Master of Corpus Christi College;
William Spens, Fellow, Tutor and Director in Science, Corpus Christi College;
Ernst Rutherford, director of the Cavendish Laboratory; Horace Lamb, former
professor in Manchester, retired in Cambridge since 1920; Alex Wood,
University Lecturer in Experimental Physics, Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel
College; R. A. Herman, University Lecturer in Mathematics, Fellow of Trinity
College; B. Melvill Jones, Francis Mond Professor of Aeronautics in Cambridge;
C. T. R. Wilson, Solar Physics Observatory, Cambridge; and R. T. Glazebrook,
former demonstrator at the Cavendish and now Director of the National
Physical Laboratory. In some of these testimonials, we can read sentences

143
144 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

unusual in this kind of letter, such as ‘I have known Mr George Thomson

of Corpus Christi College since his school days, and have watched his career
with much interest’, or ‘I have known Mr Thomson for a number of years, dat-
ing back to a period much before his undergraduate days, and have followed
his career with great interest’ (letters by Wood and Glazebrook, 21 July 1922,
UAb). For obvious reasons, the application did not include a testimonial from
his father, who, in G. P.’s words, ‘has been my chief teacher’ (G. P., application
letter, UAb).
From the few records kept about his appointment, it is possible to infer
that G. P. was the only candidate for this position: The only surviving file in
the archives of the University of Aberdeen pertaining to this competition con-
tains only G. P.’s application letter together with the testimonial letters on his
behalf; and the Minutes of the Aberdeen University Court speak only of one
candidate. Furthermore, the retiring professor’s brother, the late Sir William
D. Niven, had been G. P.’s godfather, which makes it plausible that G. P. was
particularly encouraged to apply for this job due to the close relationship
between the Niven family and the Thomson family (Thomson, 1936, p. 43).
In any case, G. P. Thomson was appointed professor on 5 September 1922,
and was granted the sum of £1,600 to equip the totally out-of-date laboratory
with new instruments. With the appointment and the money for research, it
appeared only natural to him to continue the research he had been doing in
Cambridge. As a consequence, he turned his research laboratory into a vir-
tual extension of his father’s basement room at the old Cavendish. He bought
the tubes and the vacuum pumps he needed, and reproduced in Aberdeen his
father’s experimental set-up in order to continue research on positive rays.
G. P.’s laboratory notes show, however, that this transfer of skills from Cambridge
to Aberdeen was no straightforward business. Maintaining a steady high vac-
uum proved to be more difficult than expected, his teaching and administrative
duties were time-consuming, and the lack of research students to help with the
practicalities of research was a clear limitation. At the beginning, the depart-
ment consisted of him, two lecturers (Dr Fyvie and A. E. M. Geddes), a labora-
tory assistant (C. G. Fraser) and an administrative assistant (Miss Jack). With
these conditions, he managed to publish his first experimental results only
in 1926, four years after taking up his new position (G. P. Thomson, 1926a, b).
By then, and with a grant from the Department of Scientific and Industrial
Research that allowed him to have a personal assistant to help run experi-
ments, he managed to consolidate a small research department in Aberdeen,
one that was virtually an extension of his father’s old Cavendish.
Like his father, G. P. Thomson met his future wife in the context of the univer-
sity. On the day of his job interview, he was invited to dine by the Principal and
 6.1 Professorship in Aberdeen 145

Vice-Chancellor of the university, Sir George Adam Smith, who ‘was undoubt-
edly the best loved man in the University’ (G. P. Thomson, 1966, p. 70). At din-
ner, ‘I sat next to [his daughter] Kathleen and was much impressed’, and ‘before
I had been long in Aberdeen I had made the first of many proposals’, until ‘on
the evening of 19 July [1924] she got tired of refusing me and for a change her-
self proposed’ (p. 72). The wedding took place on 18 September in the chapel
of King’s College, in Aberdeen, and the new family settled in a beautiful house,
‘rather too large for us and somewhat costly’, about five miles from town. G. P.
would normally go by bus to the university and only from time to time in his
own car. The family had four children (John, Clare, David, and Rose).
Academically, the Cavendish connection, as it were, had not disappeared
with his transfer to Aberdeen. G. P. frequently went down to Cambridge to dis-
cuss ideas and, during the summer vacation, even to perform some experiments
in the Cavendish Laboratory. For instance, in a paper of 1926, he acknowledged
advice and help received from C. D. Ellis and Mr. Wooster ‘for their kindness in
helping me to use the microphotometer in the Cavendish Laboratory … and to
Sir Ernest Rutherford for permission to use it’ (G. P. Thomson, 1926c, p. 421).
Further evidence in support of this Cavendish connection comes from the let-
ters of his wife Kathleen, which help us trace his relatively frequent trips to
Cambridge (G. P. Archives, A14 A). A third kind of source of support are his
presentations at the Kapitza Club on February and August 1927, and March
1928 and July 1929 (Churchill College Archives, CKFT 7/1).
A glance, however cursory, at the major features of G. P.’s initial experimen-
tal set-up is essential in order to understand what happened in the period 1926–
1928. Figure 6.1. shows the schematic representation of G. P.’s experiments.
A cathode-ray tube on the right with the cathode perforated is the source of
positive rays. These are introduced into the tube on the left, where they can
be deflected by the electric and magnetic fields, scattered by other gases, or
made to interfere with matter in some other way. A photographic plate on
the extreme left of the tube records the impact of the positive rays after their
interaction with the fields or matter. The experiments he had started in 1920 in
the Cavendish, and which he was continuing in Aberdeen, consisted of a study
of the scattering of these positive rays by different elements and molecules.
G. P. and J. J. supposed this to be a valid way to study the binding force between
atoms in molecules. However, even the only two papers he managed to prod-
uce on this topic while in Aberdeen show major uncertainties in regard to the
validity of the experimental results and their analysis. One of the major issues
was the impossibility of discriminating between atomic and molecular positive
rays in the incident beam. Furthermore, the charge of the positive rays was not
necessarily constant all the way through the scattering chamber, since they
146 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

Figure 6.1. Experimental set-up for the experiments on positive rays. A cathode
ray tube (right) sets the positive ions of the gas in motion. These are deflected
in L and photographed in F. (G. P. Thomson, 1920c, p. 241). Courtesy: Taylor and
Francis, Ltd.

could easily gain and lose electrons. Last but not least, G. P. was working and
analysing his results on the Newtonian assumption that the scattering between
atoms and molecules was governed by an inverse-square law, as with macro-
scopic bodies, an assumption that did not fit his experimental results at all.
While he was operating valves, sealing glass tubes, and fine-tuning the vac-
uum pump, G. P. was also trying to keep up-to-date with theoretical develop-
ments in physics. Thus, he was well aware of de Broglie’s principle through
a paper recently translated into English probably by Fowler. In that paper, de
Broglie presented the results from his recent Ph.D. dissertation, on the basis
of which he was ‘inclined to admit that any moving body may be accompanied
by a wave and that it is impossible to disjoin motion of body and propagation
of wave’ (de Broglie, 1924, p. 450). This is what soon came to be understood as
the principle of wave–particle duality, and which Schrödinger eventually turned
into a full formulation of a wave quantum mechanics (Raman & Forman, 1969).
De Broglie’s paper was entitled in English ‘A tentative theory of light quanta’,
a title which had very strong resonances for the Thomson family. The nature
of light and other radiations had been a topic of heated debates for 20 years,
a debate in which J. J. had been one of the main proponents. Actually, in the
same year – 1924 – J. J. Thomson was working on his nth attempt to explain the
photoelectric effect and the nature of light within his metaphysical framework
in which the ether, and the Faraday tubes in it, were essential elements. Far
 6.1 Professorship in Aberdeen 147

Figure 6.2. A Faraday tube between the electron and the proton bends and forms
a photon. (Thomson, 1925, p. 24). Courtesy: Cambridge University Press.

from denying the experimental evidence for the quantum of light, J. J. stressed
that this quantification was only the result of a process in the continuous
medium. Figures 6.2 and 6.3 show very graphically his idea for the processes
of light emission and absorption, respectively, in the simple case of a hydro-
gen atom. Assuming, as he did, that the proton (P) and electron (E) in the atom
interacted by means of a Faraday tube connecting them, one could imagine
what happened to the tube when an electron ‘jumped’ from one orbit of high
energy to an orbit of lesser energy. The Faraday tube would first bend, and then
form a loop that would detach from the original tube: this would constitute
the emission of a photon. Similarly, a quantum of radiation, in the form of a
closed-loop Faraday tube, could be absorbed by the tube uniting a proton and
an electron, providing the energy for the electron to jump to a higher energy
state (Thomson, 1924, 1925).
This theory could be relegated to a cabinet of intellectual curiosities, were
it not for the impact it had on his son. The paper by de Broglie was an attempt
to formulate a new theory of light, as much as J. J.’s was. Both were published
in the same year and G. P. tried to unite them in a paper in the Philosophical
Magazine. In retrospect, G. P. would regret publishing this paper, calling it
‘an example of a thoroughly bad theoretical paper’ (G. P. Thomson, 1961,
p. 821), even though it was proof, in his reconstructions of history, that he
had paid attention to de Broglie’s theory as soon as it was published in the
British milieu: ‘I think in retrospect I was in advance of my time, I think I
paid more attention to de Broglie than probably anybody else in this country
on the whole. Some people thought it was just nonsense’ (G. P. Thomson, oral
interview, AHQP, Tape T2, side 2, 8). There are two points to emphasize here.
First, that G. P. was among the first British physicists to pay serious attention
148 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

Figure 6.3. A photon is absorbed by a Faraday tube between the electron and the
proton. (Thomson, 1925, p. 27). Courtesy: Cambridge University Press.

to de Broglie’s theory. And second, that he understood it as a theory of light

and electronic orbits, not as a theory of electron diffraction or even as a theory
of free electrons.1 Although not many, a few scientists, including de Broglie

1
In his reconstruction of the events, G. P. presented a slightly different version of the
facts: ‘At that time we were all thinking of the possible ways of reconciling the appar-
ently irreconcilable. One of these ways was supposing light to be perhaps particles after
all, but particles which somehow masqueraded as waves; but no one could give any clear
idea as to why this was done. The first suggestion I ever heard which did not stress most
of all the behaviour of the radiation came from the younger Bragg, Sir William Lawrence
Bragg, who once said to me that he thought the electron was not so simple as it looked,
but never followed up this idea. However, it made a considerable impression on me, and
it pre-disposed me to appreciate de Broglie’s first paper in the Philosophical Magazine of
1924’ (G. P. Thomson, 1961, p. 821).
 6.1 Professorship in Aberdeen 149

and Einstein, as well as M. Born, J. Frank, and W. Elsasser in Göttingen and,

possibly, also C. D. Ellis in Cambridge were, by 1925, already thinking about
de Broglie’s principle in terms of electron diffraction (Russo, 1981, pp. 141–4).
As we shall see, the idea of electron diffraction as an experimental application
of de Broglie’s theory came to G. P. Thomson only some time in the summer
of 1926, not in 1924.
The title of G. P.’s 1925 paper is ‘A physical interpretation of Bohr’s station-
ary states’, and in it he tried to explain de Broglie’s radical hypothesis in terms
of J. J.’s metaphysical framework. If the trajectories of the electrons were under-
stood in terms of waves, only those orbits whose circumference is a multiple
of the wavelength can constitute stable orbits around the nucleus, a suggestion
that was totally in tune with Bohr’s quantification. G. P.’s suggestion was that
these stationary states could be equally achieved in his father’s 1924 atomic
model explained above. If the proton and the electron were united by a Faraday
tube of force, ‘it will thus be able to transmit waves, and the condition that
will be taken as determining the possible states is that the vibrations in this
tube shall be in tune with the period of the orbit’ (G. P. Thomson, 1925, p. 163).
Thus, the physical properties of the Faraday tube uniting the electron with the
nucleus would determine the waves accompanying the movement of the elec-
tron and, therefore, the possible orbits in an atom.
This example shows once again the son’s intellectual continuity with his
father’s ideas. Faraday tubes of force were very much a Thomson working tool,
and G. P. was maintaining the tradition. We can see this not only in the 1925
paper but also in the notes of 1923 for his lectures in Aberdeen. The lectures
on electricity to the Senior Honours Class contain the following definition,
which reflects G. P.’s use of Faraday tubes: ‘Defn. Regarded as filling all space.
Originally an attempt to interpret the phenomena of electricity as residing in
the medium. Now perhaps best regarded as a mathematical dodge but may
have physical reality in a modified form’ (G. P. Archives, F4, 7). It is worth not-
ing that G. P.’s attachment to this concept played a paradoxical role. While
being an increasingly problematic and out-of-fashion theoretical tool, it was his
attachment to Faraday tubes that predisposed him to pay particular attention
to de Broglie’s work well before most British physicists did. At the same time,
as the last sentence of his lecture notes suggests, tubes of force were, for G. P.,
a heuristic tool with perhaps less physical reality than they had for his father.
The science of the son, while highly dependent on the father’s, was not a sim-
ple reproduction of it, but an evolution from it. And this continuity could be
better maintained in Aberdeen, where G. P. Thomson had virtually extended
the dominions of the J. J.’s old physics into a new environment. Experimentally,
the devices he developed in his new laboratory turned it into an extension
of his father’s rooms at the Cavendish. Intellectually, no-one in Aberdeen was
150 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

going to react against this physics as the young generation of ‘modernists with
a vengeance’ did in Cambridge (Hughes, 1998).

6.2 Electron diffraction

‘By 1926 I was feeling depressed by having failed to produce anything

of real note. In fact, positive rays, as distinct from the study of isotopes, were
nearly worked out, at least for the time’ (G. P. Archives, A6, 7). Looking at his
laboratory notebooks, however, no hint of G. P.’s disappointment is evident: in
the first half of the year he kept accumulating data and changing the experi-
mental conditions in his work on positive rays. The last entry before the sum-
mer break was from 23 June, he was testing the scattering of positive rays in
argon; the next entry, on 23 August, clearly signalled a shift of research project:
‘Alteration to apparatus. A slip of gold leaf mounted on brass carrier + partly cov-
ering aperture in camera. Aperture in camera enlarged downwards about ¼.
Diaphragm slit moved down to zero mark’ (G. P. Archives, C24, 13, emphasis in
the original). His quest for electron diffraction had started.
The various autobiographical notes by G. P. on the events leading up to his
measurement of electron diffraction are a little incomplete and not wholly
consistent with each other in some details. They all agree, however, as does
all the other evidence, in attributing critical importance to the month of
August 1926, both in Oxford and in Cambridge. From the 4th to the 11th,
the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meet-
ing in Oxford; and it turned out to be the forum in which many British and
American physicists learnt about the latest developments in wave quantum
mechanics. During the spring of that year Erwin Schrödinger had, on the
basis of de Broglie’s ideas, reinterpreted wave mechanics from a quantum
perspective. Max Born, present at the meeting, explained these developments
to the participants, and the topic became one of the highlights in the infor-
mal discussions at the meeting. Born’s paper had a strong impact on many
present, but especially on Clinton J. Davisson, an American physicist work-
ing at the Bell laboratories, when he heard that the anomalous results he
had been obtaining in experiments on electron dispersion with his colleague
Lester H. Germer might be signs of electron diffraction. That part of the story,
which was studied in detail by Arturo Russo, ended with the confirmation of
electron diffraction in the Bell laboratories and the sharing of the Nobel Prize
with G. P. Thomson for their experimental proof of de Broglie’s principle.
At the time of his first experiments, however, Thomson was not fully aware
of Davisson’s project. Born also mentioned the experiments of the young
German physicist Walter M. Elsasser, who had unsuccessfully tried to detect
 6.2 Electron diffraction 151

diffraction patterns in the transmission of an electron beam through a metallic

film (Russo, 1981).
Straight after the Oxford meeting, G. P. stopped over in Cambridge, where
he usually spent part of the summer with his family. There, he could continue
discussions on electron diffraction, and, at the Cavendish, he met E. G. Dymond
who thought he had obtained evidence of electron diffraction with experiments
on the scattering of electrons in helium (Dymond, 1926; G. P. Thomson, 1968).
It is the case that, be it from conversations in Oxford or in Cambridge,2 G. P.
saw – or was led to understand – that his experimental device in Aberdeen was
almost all that was needed to try electron diffraction through solids. Actually,
the role played in this story by Dymond’s results, later to be proved erroneous,
is quite unclear. In one of the accounts, G. P. said that Dymond’s experiments
were slightly demoralising, since the ‘only’ thing left for him was to obtain
evidence for the same phenomenon in solids: ‘When I returned to Aberdeen
I thought, “Well, it has apparently been done with a gas, but let’s try it on
solids”’ (G. P. Thomson, 1961, p. 823). In other accounts, however, G. P. empha-
sizes that it was the uncertainty of Dymond’s results that encouraged him to
attempt electron diffraction through solids (G. P. Thomson, 1968, p. 7).
A quick comparison of the experimental set-up he had so far used for his
experiments on positive rays (Figure 6.1) with the one he used in his work
of 1926–1927 (Figure 6.4) clearly shows that few changes were needed for

Figure 6.4. Experimental device used by G. P. Thomson in his observations of

electron diffraction. A cathode-ray tube (right) sends electrons to be photographed at
E after being diffracted at C. (G. P. Thomson, 1928a, p. 602). Courtesy: Royal Society.

2
In Cambridge, P. M. S. Blackett had also tried to obtain evidence of electron diffraction,
but gave up after a few months (Nye, 2004, p. 46).
152 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

the new measurements. His original set-up provided positive rays using a
cathode-ray tube; and now, the same tube could be the source of a beam of
electrons. The ‘apparatus for studying the scattering of positive rays … could
be used for this experiment with little more change than reversing the cur-
rent in the gaseous discharge which formed the rays’ (G. P. Archives, A6, 10/3).
The rest of the arrangement only differed in the fact that instead of scatter-
ing the electrons in a gas, he attempted their diffractive dispersion through a
thin metallic plate. The latter was, in retrospect, the only real experimental
change, one for which he depended on the good skills of the head mechanic
in the laboratory, C. G. Fraser, who had been trained as a watchmaker, and
succeeded in obtaining the extremely thin metallic films that were needed.
In fact, things proved to be a bit more complicated. According to his labora-
tory notebook, G. P,’s experiments between 23 August and 15 September 1926,
mainly using celluloid films, did not provide much information. The next entry
is dated 10 December 1926, when he decided to start afresh and set up his
experimental device in the ‘end room in Basement’, taking much care at every
step. For instance, ‘scrupulous care observed in glasswork, all tubes washed
before blowing + cleaned before mounting with a saturated solution of potas-
sium bichromatic in commercial sulphuric acid afterwards washed + then dried
with alcohol’ (G. P. Archives, C24, p. 21), or ‘high tension apparatus mounted in
the corner of the room away from galvanometer + lead to discharge tube slung
from shellacked glass rods hooked to cords along the roof’ (p. 22). It is worth
pointing out that the absence of laboratory entries in October and November is
possibly due to a lack of time and space to perform his experimental work dur-
ing term time, which makes us wonder how pressing he thought these experi-
ments were in the autumn of 1926.
The December work ended up with a disappointing ‘Apparatus Dismantled’
on 3 January 1927, due to constant leakage in different parts of the set-up,
and a new attempt to rebuild the apparatus began on 12 January. For half a
year, he and his research student Andrew Reid systematically sent cathode rays
through thin celluloid films, looking for possible diffraction of the electrons
using photographic plates and a photometer. The first significant results were
published in a joint paper in Nature in June 1927, where they showed one pic-
ture ‘recalling the haloes formed by mist round the sun’ (G. P. Thomson & Reid,
1927, p. 890). Actually, the only way to see the concentric circles produced by
the sought-after diffraction of cathode rays through celluloid was to measure
the intensity of light on the photographic plate with a photometer: ‘in this way
rings can be detected which may not be obvious to direct inspection’. These
results, however encouraging, were certainly not conclusive, but they were pre-
sented as confirmation of Dymond’s earlier results.
 6.2 Electron diffraction 153

After the untimely death of Reid in a motorcycle accident, G. P. Thomson

continued the experiments on his own, now no longer with celluloid, but
with thin films of gold, aluminium, platinum and other metals prepared by
Mr. Fraser. Again we read, in the summer of 1927, and after more than a
month’s pause, ‘New Apparatus, July 7th 1927’ (G. P. Archives, C24, p. 71), with
which he immediately started testing the new films. We often read sentences
like the following, which give us a sense of the mechanical difficulties of deal-
ing with such thin films, once the pumps, cathode rays and other more sophis-
ticated elements of the experimental set-up were finally under control: ‘Films
mounted but broke in the drying’ or ‘Several films produced + floated on water
but not successfully lifted due to extreme difficulty of seeing whether the film
lay across the aperture of the holder or not. Films left overnight floating on
water were found to have thinned down or else disappeared with the action of
the residual acid in the water’ (p. 84). In October 1927, he obtained some good
photographs indisputably showing the diffraction patterns of cathode rays
through some of these thin films as he had been expecting for over a year now.
These results were published in a note in Nature in December 1927, followed by
a full account of his work in several articles in the Proceedings of the Royal Society
in 1928 and 1929 (G. P. Thomson, 1927, 1928a, b, 1929a). Electron diffraction
was now a reality.
Before we move on, another element needs to be highlighted here: the close
connection between his experiments and the long tradition in research on X-ray
diffraction, to which G. P. was certainly no stranger. After the discovery of X-ray
diffraction by Planck’s protégé, Max von Laue, in Munich in 1912, G. P.’s lifelong
friend Willie Bragg had modified his father’s research project on X-rays and
understood that X-ray diffraction could be used as a tool to determine the crys-
talline structure of solids. This other father–son story culminated in the shared
Nobel Prize that the two Braggs received in 1915 and, most importantly, con-
solidated the emergence of the new science of X-ray crystallography in Britain.3
G. P. certainly followed these developments closely through his friendship with
the young Bragg, with whom he spent summer holidays on his boat, the Fortuna
(Hunter, 2004, pp. 70 and 104). His other lifelong friend, C. G. Darwin, was
responsible for the formulation of the most successful theory of X-ray diffrac-
tion between 1913 and 1922 (G. P. Thomson, 1963).
There were quite a few similarities between G. P.’s experiments and the ones
on X-ray diffraction, since the energy of the waves de Broglie was talking about

3
I do not mean to say here that there is a parallel between the story of the Braggs, father
and son, and the story of the Thomsons, also father and son. I only suggest that one can
easily suppose that G. P.’s friendship with Bragg was a natural channel for him to follow
closely the developments on X-rays.
154 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

was of the same order as that of hard X-rays. The only great difference between
X-rays and the waves of cathode rays was that the latter could be deflected
with electric and magnetic fields due to their electric charge, a difference that
proved essential in order to confirm that the diffracted patterns were due not to
secondary X-rays but to the cathode rays themselves. Again, this was a feature
that the experimental arrangement of G. P.’s project on positive rays already
included: like the experiment that had led to the hypothesis of the corpuscle in
1897, the Thomsons’ study of positive rays involved their deflection by electric
and magnetic fields in the glass tube.
The following anecdote serves to illustrate the importance of electromag-
netic deflection. Probably around the beginning of March 1928, G. P. had the
opportunity to discuss his experimental results with Schrödinger himself as
the latter recalled in 1945:

After mentioning briefly the new theoretical ideas that came up in

1925/26, I wish to tell of my meeting you in Cambridge in 1927/28
(I think it was in 1928) and of the great impression the marvellous
first interference photographs made on me, which you kindly brought
to Mr Birthwistle’s [sic] house, where I was confined with a … cold.
I remember particularly a fit of scepticism on my side (‘And how do
you know it is not the interference pattern of some secondary X-rays?’)
which you immediately met by a magnificent plate, showing the
whole pattern turned aside by a magnetic field (Schrödinger to
G. P. Thomson, 5 February 1945, G. P. Archives, J105, 4).

The pictures G. P. obtained were powerful enough to convince his audience

(Figure 6.5). The circular halos were widely recognized as the Hull–Debye–
Scherrer patterns of diffraction, already known for X-rays. Therefore, if those
pictures were really obtained from cathode rays, there was no choice but to
accept that the electrons behaved like waves: ‘The detailed agreement shown
in these experiments with the de Broglie theory must, I think, be regarded as
strong evidence in its favour’ (G. P. Thomson, 1928a, p. 608).
If the period between the summer of 1926 and the spring of 1928 saw only
a few changes in the experimental culture of G. P. Thomson, there is more to
be said about the impact that his experimental results had on the theoretical
foundations of his physics. The photographs were, for him, a clear demonstra-
tion that the electrons behaved like waves, and solid evidence of the validity
of de Broglie’s principle, a principle that involved a serious reconsideration of
the nature of waves and particles. In a paper he submitted in November 1927
paper, we can read that his results involved ‘accepting the view that ordinary
Newtonian mechanics (including the modifications for relativity) are only a
 6.2 Electron diffraction 155

Figure 6.5. First patters of electron diffraction obtained by G. P. Thomson.

(G. P. Thomson, 1928a, plate 19). Courtesy: The Royal Society.

first approximation to the truth, bearing the same relation to the complete
theory that geometrical optics does to the wave theory’ (G. P. Thomson, 1928a,
pp. 608–9). This and other similar sentences appear to be suggesting a partial
abandonment of the classical mechanics he had thus far been immersed in,
immediately raising the question of what it was that G. P. had understood and
accepted of the latest developments in quantum physics.
Besides the impetus that the British Association for the Advancement of
Science meeting in Oxford of 1926 gave to a significant number of British physi-
cists, G. P. benefitted, once again, from his close friendship with C. G. Darwin
who in 1924 became the Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy in Edinburgh and
who spent the spring of 1927 in Copenhagen, where he could discuss the latest
developments in quantum mechanics with Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger,
among others. On his way back, Darwin spent some time in Aberdeen, in G. P.’s
home. In this way, G. P. learnt the new wave mechanics from Darwin’s explana-
tions: ‘we had long talks about all this, and really began to get an idea about it’
(G. P. Thomson, oral interview, AHQP, Tape T2, side 2, 15). The timing was just
right. As G. P. was seeing with his own eyes the diffraction patterns of cathode
rays, he understood them in light of Darwin’s explanations. There were obvious
156 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

reasons, on G. P.’s side, to think that Darwin was possibly the British physicist
best suited for understanding them at that time. In his biographical memoir
on Darwin, G. P. said that ‘I am inclined to think that his most useful work was
as an interpreter of the new quantum theory to experimental physicists.... I
should like to record my great debt to him for the many ideas in physics he
helped me to understand’ (G. P. Thomson, 1963, p. 81).
Later, we shall explore the impact that the experiments on electron diffrac-
tion had on G. P.’s theoretical framework, looking at his early explanations of
the phenomena, and also at the relationship between his and Darwin’s expla-
nations. However, let us pause for a moment before that and look at the reac-
tion of his father, J. J., in the face of the inescapable experimental evidence.

6.3 The father’s interpretation

The father saw, in the experiments of his son, the final proof of his life-
long metaphysical project and a clear sign of the invalidity of quantum physics
as an ultimate explanation. His world had always been, and still was, a world
of ether, in which discrete entities, including the electrons, were but epiphe-
nomena in the ether. Now, in 1928, J. J. Thomson felt his metaphysical idea
had proved true and that electron diffraction was a sign that discrete models of
matter were only rough approximations of reality. In his mind, the ‘very inter-
esting theory of wave dynamics put forward by L. de Broglie’, and experimen-
tally demonstrated by his son, was not in contradiction to classical mechanics.
In the first of a series of papers he published in Philosophical Magazine, J. J. tried
to show that ‘the waves are also a consequence of classical dynamics if that
be combined with the view that an electric charge is not to be regarded as a
point without structure, but as an assemblage of lines of force starting from the
charge and stretching out into space’ (Thomson, 1928a, p. 191).
Thomson had never accepted the idea put forward by Larmor and Lorentz
at the turn of the century that an electron was a point charge of electricity in
the ether. Now, the detection of a train of waves associated with the motion
of electrons was, for him, proof that he had been right: Maxwell’s equations
did not predict such a wave for a point-electron, and therefore such a view of
the electron had to be wrong. On the other hand, de Broglie’s wave could be
obtained on purely classical grounds if he assumed the electron to be a two-part
system: a ‘nucleus which … is a charge e of negative electricity concentrated in
a small sphere’ (Thomson, 1928b, p. 1259), and a sphere surrounding it ‘made
up of parts which can be set in motion by electric forces … consist[ing] either
of a distribution of discrete lines of force, or of a number of positively- and
negatively-electrified particles distributed through the sphere of the electron’
 6.3 The father’s interpretation 157

(p. 1254). Using this ad hoc structure, J. J. deduced the relationship between the
speed of an electron and the wavelength of its sphere to be the same as that
expected by de Broglie and measured by G. P. As for the electron as a compos-
ite sphere, he would eventually express this in terms of what he came to call
‘granules’, particles ‘having the same mass µ, moving with the velocity of light
c, and possessing the same energy µc2’ (Thomson, 1930/31, p. 86).
At a conference held at Girton College, Cambridge, in March 1928 entitled
‘Beyond the Electron’, J. J. argued that talking about a structure for the electron
was not ludicrous. Thirty years earlier, when he first suggested that corpuscles
would be constituents of all atoms, thus initiating the exploration of the struc-
ture of the atom, he was accused of alchemy. The developments of the physics
of the electron had dismissed that accusation. Now he felt justified in talking
about the structure of the electron in the light of the latest developments by his
son. ‘Is not going beyond the electron really going too far, ought one not draw
the line somewhere?’, he would ask rhetorically, to which he would reply that
‘It is the charm of Physics that there are no hard and fast boundaries, that each
discovery is not a terminus but an avenue leading to country as yet unexplored,
and that however long the science may exist there will still be an abundance of
unsolved problems and no danger of unemployment for physicists’ (Thomson,
1928c, p. 9).
The diffraction experiments showed that ‘we have energy located at the elec-
tron itself, but moving along with it and guiding it, we have also a system of
waves’ (Thomson, 1928c, p. 22). Following the similarities with his structure
of light of 1924, he supposed that the electron ‘had a dual structure, one part
of this structure, that where the energy is located, being built up with a num-
ber of lines of electric force, while the other part is a train of waves in reson-
ance with the electron and which determine the path along which it travels’
(p. 23). For him, the association of a wave with an electron was not a new
phenomenon. The association had already been made when, in the late eight-
eenth century, the corpuscles of light that Newton had postulated needed to
be complemented by wave explanations. It was not so strange to see that the
new corpuscles, the electrons, had to receive similar treatment. Furthermore,
discussions on the nature of light in the previous two decades had paved the
way for the acceptance of the duality of the electron.
In the world of J. J, electron diffraction brought about the possibility of
challenging, rather than accepting, the new quantum physics. A continuous
metaphysics in which all phenomena and entities could be seen as structures of
the ether was, in his view, still possible. Furthermore, J. J. felt that at last elec-
tron diffraction provided the clinching argument in defence of the old world-
view, something that the developments of the previous two decades had, albeit
158 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

seemingly, jeopardized. Electron diffraction was proof of the complexity of the

electron and, therefore, of the validity of classical mechanics. Quantification
of magnitudes such as momentum or energy ‘is the result and expression of
the structure of the electron; only such motions are possible, or at any rate sta-
ble, as are in resonance with the vibrations of the underworld of the electron’
(Thomson, 1928c, p. 31).
At the root of his models, there was a metaphysical problem as much as an
epistemological one. As already stated, J. J.’s metaphysics involved a continuum
in terms of which all discrete phenomena could, and should, be explained.
Parallel to that was an epistemological problem: for Thomson, de Broglie’s the-
ories, as much as Planck’s, were valid only from a mathematical point of view.
Their results were valid, but they did not entail real, true physics. And that was
the strength that J. J. saw his theory had over de Broglie’s: ‘The coincidences
are remarkable because two theories could hardly be more different in their
points of view. M. de Broglie’s theory is purely analytical in form; the one I have
brought before you … is essentially physical’ (Thomson, 1928c, p. 34). It comes
as no surprise that, true to the spirit in which he was educated and with which
he had worked for so long, physical meant mechanical.
In an ironic remark on the situation of physics in previous years, he stated
in 1930 that

when the waves are taken into account, the classical theory of dynamics
gives the requisite distribution of orbit [of the electrons] in the
atom, and as far as these go the properties of the atom are not more
inconsistent with classical dynamics than are the properties of organ
pipes and violin strings, in which, as in the case of the electron, waves
have to be accommodated within a certain distance. It is too much to
expect even from classical dynamics that it should give the right result
when supplied with the wrong material (Thomson, 1930, pp. 26–7).

Obviously, the fact that the proof had come from within the family could not
but be an added reason to rejoice.4 Actually, we see him using the expression
‘your electronic waves’ in writing letters to his son after G. P.’s experiments
(G. P. Thomson, 1964, p. 157). In the decade between these events and his
death in 1940, J. J. did not change his mind. The last paper he ever published,
sent in October 1938 at the age of 81, still proclaimed his son’s experiments
as proof of the validity of the old classical mechanics (Thomson, 1939).

4
Oral interview with G. P. Thomson, Archive for the History of Quantum Physics, Tape T2, side
2, 9: ‘Well, I think he was very pleased [with my developments], largely because it was
in the family’.
 6.3 The father’s interpretation 159

Let us finish this section with the manuscript notes of a lecture ‘to discuss a
method of describing the electric field in terms of physical conceptions rather
than mathematical symbols’ (Thomson, CUL, Add 7654, UC7.7, p. 1) dated
1932–3. True to the philosophy of science he emphasized in the 1890s, already
described in Chapter 3, J. J. kept arguing for the superiority of what he calls ‘the
physical method’, which consists of visualizing every physical event through
some mental process. He complained that ‘of late years the tendency has been
to adopt a purely mathematical treatment of some branches of physics, to
make no attempt to visualize what is going on but to regard everything from
the point of view of the properties of a function which satisfies a certain differ-
ential equation’, in clear reference to the dominant trend in quantum physics,
a trend that, in his view, would paralyse science altogether, since ‘you cannot
visualise an abstraction, while you can a physical system, and visualization is
a tremendous aid to concentration of thought and to the birth of new ideas’.
Of course, mathematical precision is of great value in scientific work, but cer-
tain so-called precision is not really such, and can also be a science-stopper:
mathematicians usually obtain only the differential equations, and not their
full solutions; they speak about wave-functions of electrons, but they do not
know how to interpret the function. They have, ‘generally speaking, succeeded
in obtaining solutions when the bodies they are dealing with have simple geo-
metrical shapes, when they are for example planes, cones or spheres, … [It]
resembles one in a picture by a cubic artist built up of figures just mentioned
with an ellipsoid or two in by way of ornament’ (p. 2–3). Using an old expres-
sion of his, he reminds us that he regards ‘a physical theory as a tool and not as
a creed … the important thing about a theory is not so much is it “true” as it is
useful’ (p. 3). In that same lecture, he defended what he called the ‘materialist’
attitude towards elusive entities like the ether, and he used two examples to
support his thesis: the existence of atoms and the fluid theory of electricity. The
first was a usual response against the claims of positivists, but the latter comes
a bit as a surprise:

When the fluid theory was first introduced physicists took a

comparatively materialistic view of these fluids. They were prepared to
consider the possibility of their having some of the ordinary properties
of fluids, mass for example, and experiments were made to see if the
absence or presence of these fluids affected the weight of a body. By
the middle of the last century the materialistic view had gone quite
out of fashion, the word fluid was interpreted in a very picturesque
sense, it was a disembodied fluid from which everything material had
disappeared and it was thought almost as improper to suppose it had
160 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

any material attributes as to suppose an angel possessed any limbs

other than wings. The fluid of those times was like the grin of the
Cheshire cat without the cat. The progress of science has justified the
more materialistic view. It has shown that negative electricity consists
of a collection of electrons, that these electrons have all the same
mass and charge, and that a free charge of negative electricity may be
regarded as a gas made up of discrete particles … The electric fluid is
an example of the very interesting fact in the history of science that
to tone down the material side of a theory to escape … criticism …
has generally resulted in growing up the substance to get the shadow
(Thomson, CUL, Add 7654, UC7.7, p. 7).

As we shall see in the next section, the battle in the late 1920s and early 1930s
between those who advocated a realist interpretation of the new quantum
mechanics, especially in its wave formulation, and those defending a more
mathematically oriented and less intuitive approach, especially in the formal-
ism of Heisenberg and Dirac, was being won by the latter. J. J. Thomson’s under-
standing of what physics had to be was no different from that of many people of
his generation and younger. Electronic waves could be the beginning of their
comeback. Electronic waves were proof that the ether was real and, to a large
extent, material.

6.4 The son’s reaction

G. P. made public his preliminary results in a short note in Nature

dated May 1927 and in a presentation at the Kapitza Club, in Cambridge, on
the 2 August (G. P. Thomson & Reid, 1927; Churchill Archives, CKFT, 7/1). In
November, he was ready to publish a long and detailed paper in the Proceedings
of the Royal Society, preceded by another short note in Nature (G. P. Thomson,
1927; 1928a). These papers were basically a just description of the experimental
methods and results from which he extracted what were, for him, two obvious
consequences: the results could only be explained if we considered electron
beams to undergo diffraction, like X-rays, and this diffraction was consistent
with the one predicted by de Broglie. In other words, G. P. Thomson had no
doubt that his experiments were a direct proof of the principle of wave-particle
duality; but, as for any further consequences of this principle, he preferred
to be cautious. A quotation from his Friday speech at the Royal Institution of
6 June 1929, describes his approach to what we may call metaphysical specu-
lation in this period of his life. After explaining in full detail the experiments
on electron diffraction, he ventured to try to answer the ‘great difficulties of
 6.4 The son’s reaction 161

interpretation. What are these waves? Are they another name for the electron
itself ? … Some of these questions I should like very briefly to discuss, but we
now leave the sure foothold of experiment for the dangerous but fascinating
paths traced by the mathematicians among the quicksands of metaphysics’
(G. P. Thomson, 1928d, p. 281). Despite this reluctance, there were two ques-
tions that he was wont to address in these metaphysical excursions: the reality
of the ether, and the ontological status of the electronic wave in relation to the
particle.
The best and most comprehensive source we have for understanding G. P.’s
views at this time is The Wave Mechanics of Free Electrons (G. P. Thomson, 1930),
which contains the lectures he gave at Cornell University during the last term
of 1929. Here we find a thorough explanation of the implications of his experi-
ments on the very important question of the existence of the ether. The wave-
lengths of electron waves and X-rays are in the same range, but electron waves
and X-rays clearly behave differently, for the first can be deflected, and the
second cannot. If that is the case, one might need to assume two different
media to account for the different behaviour of the two waves, ‘but it is not a
very attractive idea to have two ethers filling the space, especially as the waves
of protons – if they exist – would demand yet a third. Space is becoming over-
crowded’ (G. P. Thomson, 1930, p. 11). G. P.’s solution was to apply Ockham’s
razor, doing away with the ether and retaining the wave formulation; ‘perhaps
simple physicists may be content as long as the waves do their job guiding the
electron, and it is possible that, after all, the question will ultimately be seen to
be meaningless’ (p. 12). In the lecture at the Royal Institution mentioned above,
he stated that ‘The easiest way of looking at the whole thing seems to be to
regard the waves as an expression of the laws of motion’ (G. P. Thomson, 1928d,
p. 282). And to lend authority to his point of view, he finished his speculations
by quoting Newton’s famous ‘hypotheses non fingo’.
Abandoning the implications of an ether was, however, not straightforward.
One of G. P.’s most radical, and short-lived, speculations during these years was
the possibility that strict energy conservation might have to be abandoned in
order to explain beta radioactive decay (Jensen, 2000). That comes as no sur-
prise since C. G. Darwin had been, for almost a decade, a strong advocate of this
possibility (Stolzenburg, 1984, pp. 13–9, 67–9, 317–9; Kalkar, 1985, pp. 6, 91–9,
305–19, 347–9). Actually, it was following calculations made by Darwin on his
way back from Copenhagen that G. P. suggested a mechanism to account for the
dispersion of energy in beta decay. Essentially, G. P. suggested that the actual
beta emission did conserve energy, but that the huge acceleration experienced
by the electron in its ejection from the nucleus involved the creation of an
energetic wave, like ‘the sound produced by the firing of an atomic gun whose
162 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

bullet is the electron’ (G. P. Thomson, 1929b, p. 410). Such a wave could be sup-
posed to ‘possess energy when highly concentrated which it loses on spreading
out’ (p. 415), giving rise to an indeterminacy in the energy of the electron. This
idea, however, involves some friction of the pulse wave, which is an implicit
remnant of the role of the ether (G. P. Thomson, 1928c). G. P. did not pursue
this idea any further, but this instance shows us both that the abandonment
of classical concepts was not straightforward, and that his incursion into the
quantum physics was very strongly dependent on Darwin’s understanding of
the new physics (Navarro, 2009).
In Darwin’s view, Schrödinger’s wave mechanics had some sort of onto-
logical priority over matrix mechanics. It is part of the received view on the
developments of quantum physics that in 1926 the equivalence between wave
and matrix mechanics was demonstrated (Muller, 1997; Kragh, 1999; Mehra &
Rechenberg, 2000). However, Darwin’s work in these years shows his uneasi-
ness with Heisenberg’s methods, since they do not provide true, i.e., mech-
anical, explanations. In several places, we find statements like the following:
‘There are probably readers who will share the present writer’s feeling that
the methods of non-commutative algebra are harder to follow, and certainly
much more difficult to invent, than are operations of types long familiar to ana-
lysis’. And as a solution to this difficulty, he thought that ‘Wherever it is pos-
sible to do so, it is surely better to present the theory in a mathematical form
that dates from the time of Laplace and Legendre, if only because the details
of the calculus have been so much more thoroughly explored’ (Darwin, 1928,
p. 654; see also Darwin, 1931, p. 124). Furthermore, in what looks like very clear
philosophical positioning, both epistemologically and metaphysically, Darwin
argues for the metaphysical reality of the wave function:

We shall … take the wave function ψ as the central feature of the

quantum theory … From the practical point of view the great
advantage of thinking in terms of ψ is that it forces on our attention
the diffractive effects of matter and treats them as a more fundamental
property than the ray-like properties which suffice for the description
of ordinary events… There is no need to invoke particle-like properties
in the unobserved parts of any occurrence, since the wave function ψ
will give all the necessary effects (Darwin, 1929, pp. 391–2).

According to Darwin, matrix mechanics is only an ingenious mathematical

method useful for explaining observable results, especially in the field of spec-
troscopy, but it is not helpful in understanding what the reality of things is.
Darwin’s understanding of quantum physics emphasized the link between a
continuous wave-like metaphysics and the discrete quantum manifestations in
 6.4 The son’s reaction 163

natural phenomena. The latter was only particular instances of a much richer
world, the world of possibilities.
G. P. Thomson’s interpretation was, although slightly different, related to
Darwin’s. He regarded his experiments as some sort of proof of de Broglie’s
principle, and this meant, for him, that matter could altogether be thought of
as essentially continuous:

Matter is still supposed made of discrete units, but instead of these

units moving according to laws which concern them alone, as did
the laws of Newtonian dynamics, we have had to introduce laws
based on waves. Now a wave is essentially a continuous thing, even if
the continuity is only mathematical. It is spread through space, not
divided into little lumps. So although the older belief in the discontinuity of
matter still holds, it has lost some of its rigidity; continuity has crept in by the
back door (G. P. Thomson, 1930, p. 12).

Quantum physics was, in this way, no longer a threat to the continuous con-
ceptions of matter with which he had grown up. Certainly, continuity was no
longer dependent on the physical existence of the ether, but the fundamental
entities of nature, electrons and quanta, were proving to be also fundamen-
tally continuous. In this respect, Darwin’s influence was instrumental to G. P.’s
understanding the new physics as, in some way, being in continuity with the
old. Darwin emphasized the natural link between both approaches in a very
revealing statement: ‘We recall that Hamilton worked out very exact analogies
between the behaviour of rays of light and particles of matter … But de Broglie
pushed the matter to its logical conclusion by saying that if light and matter
are refracted in the same way, then they ought to be diffracted in the same way
too’ (G. P. Thomson, 1930, p. 107). From Darwin’s point of view, the new physics
in its wave formulation was a natural extension of classical physics and could
preserve a continuous ontology. This approach enabled G. P. to embrace elec-
tron diffraction as a radical experimental result, and wave–particle duality as
equally a revolutionary principle, without totally undermining his fundamental
understanding of physics, both mathematically and metaphysically. Certainly,
both Darwin and Thomson could feel at ease with a quantum mechanics that
preserved a continuous ontology, as well as the need for visual explanations,
since these were fundamental tenets in their training as physicists. As for vis-
ual interpretations, an example G. P. often used in his popular lectures is that
of the gossamer spider:

When at rest this spider is a minute insect. When it wants to move it

sends out streamers into the air, and floats away owing to the action
164 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

of the air on these filaments which stretch out a foot or more all
round it. Just so the electron, when it is part of an atom its waves are
limited to that atom, or even to a part of it. They are curled round on
themselves, as it were. Suppose, now, an electron escapes from the
hot filament of a wireless valve and gets free. Its waves will spread
far out into the space round it. I regard it as still a particle at the
centre of its wave system. The analogy can be pressed further. If the
wind sweeps the spider past an obstacle the filaments will catch. The
pull on filaments will move the spider, and he will feel that there is
something in the way, even though his body does not actually hit it.
In the same way the waves are a means by which the motion of the
electron is affected by things which the main body of the electron
never comes very near (G. P. Thomson, 1929c, p. 220).

This analogy resonates with J. J.’s suggestion of a structure for the electron;
and it can also be seen as a pedagogical explanation of Darwin’s idea that the
wave function describes all the possible movements of the electron. The three
approaches are certainly not totally equivalent, but they are linked by the rejec-
tion of an ultimate exclusively discrete, i.e., quantum, physics. The three were
aware that the diffraction experiments entailed a turning point in physics,
albeit a turning point that allowed for continuous explanations of Nature to
regain their legitimacy against the threat of an excessively discrete quantum
physics.

6.5 Moving to London. Electron diffraction turns

into an instrument

The Aberdeen experience came to an end in 1930, when G. P. was

offered a chair at Imperial College, London, after his close friend Willie Bragg
had declined the same offer. Also in that year, he was made a fellow of the
Royal Society, following in the steps of both his father and his (maternal) grand-
father. The new appointment was an opportunity to work in a larger setting
than Aberdeen, with more means of conducting research, although it also
involved undertaking more administrative work than in Scotland. His work
on electron diffraction had made him a well-known figure in contemporary
physics in his own right, not as just the ‘son of Sir J. J.’: he had obtained proof
of one of the most unintuitive principles of quantum mechanics, ‘the son of
Sir J. J.’, having obtained proof of one of the most unintuitive principles of the
new quantum mechanics. However, he was no theoretician, and his experi-
ence in physics was basically on the experimental side. And, actually, beyond
 6.5 Electron diffraction turns into an instrument 165

the popular talks in which he discussed the nature of electronic waves, he

was well aware that the deep theoretical implications of his discovery were
beyond his research interests and capabilities. Thus, his experiments were not
a springboard for him to become part of the quantum generation, but rather
he capitalized on his experience with electron diffraction as an experimen-
talist, by turning his discovery into a laboratory instrument. In his Nobel lec-
ture, he gave a biography of the electron, from his father’s discovery to his own
experiments, but then cautioned his audience, saying that electron diffrac-
tion was not ‘of interest only to those concerned with the fundamentals of
physics. It has important practical applications to the study of surface effects’
(G. P. Thomson, 1938). While the Braggs had turned X-ray diffraction into a tech-
nique for the investigation of the structure of crystals, electron waves could
complement the X-ray technique for thin surfaces, since X-rays are too pene-
trating for the analysis of just a few layers of atoms, while it is precisely the fast
absorption of electron waves that make their diffraction useful for thin layers
of solid metals. This became G. P.’s project in the 1930s. His last paper from
Aberdeen, and the articles published in the early 1930s, when he was already
at Imperial College, relate to what he called ‘for shortness an electron camera’
(G. P. Thomson & Fraser, 1930, p. 641). G. P. wanted the device, for which he
provided a detailed technical configuration in the Proceedings of the Royal Society,
to be an easily reproducible apparatus ‘to study the diffraction patterns formed
by the reflection of cathode rays from crystalline surfaces’.
After his experiments, and those of Davisson and Germer, were made public
in 1927, a relatively large number of research teams managed to obtain similar
results: C. Eckart and F. Zwicky at Caltech, A. L. Patterson in Berlin, E. Rupp at
AEG, Berlin, D. C. Rose in Cambridge, S. Kikuchi and S. Nishikawa in Tokyo,
A. Szczeniewski in Paris, R. T. Cox, C. G. McIlwraith and B. Kurrelmeyer in New
York, A. F. Joffé and A. N. Arsenieva in Leningrad, among others (Gehrenbeck,
1974, pp. 309–34). Most of these replications followed G. P. in the use of higher-
energy electrons, as opposed to Davisson and Germer’s use of the more diffi-
cult-to-handle slow rays, but they also followed the latter in the study of beams
incident and reflected on the surfaces of metallic solids rather than the beams
traversing the very thin foils that G. P. had used. This ‘electron camera’ put these
two elements together, creating a tool that merged the new electron diffraction
with the more settled techniques of X-ray crystallography. That also explains
why electron diffraction quickly became a tool, since it could be appropriated
by crystallographers with relative ease.
The undulatory nature of the electron was soon accepted, both by quan-
tum theoreticians who, in a way, had been expecting the result, and by experi-
mentalists, who immediately made use of electronic waves. After G. P.’s and
166 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

Davisson and Germer’s experiments, there was no question of the existence

of these waves. There were, of course, many question marks over their behav-
iour in particular instances, and this is where we find controversies: in refrac-
tion and dispersion, polarization of electrons, some peculiar results with mica,
ruled gratings, surface gases, and gaseous scattering, for instance (Gehrenbeck,
1974). And electron diffraction became a tool for examining anomalous results
and open questions obtained using the techniques of X-ray diffraction. The fol-
lowing extract from a coauthored paper by researchers at Imperial College,
including G. P. Thomson, bears witness to the naturalness with which this
transfer took place:

In May, 1930, Mr. H. M. D. White at our request carried out at University

College an X-ray examination by the Debye–Scherrer method of two
platinum films which had been sputtered for this purpose on the
quartz rods. The results were, however, negative. Accordingly, in
March, 1931, it was suggested to Professor G. P. Thomson, FRS, that
an electron diffraction examination of these platinum surfaces might
possibly disclose that feature of the structure upon which catalytic
properties appeared to depend (Finch et al., 1933, p. 415).

In January 1936, G. P. had to postpone all his commitments due to serious ill-
ness; a perinephric abscess with subsequent complications for which he had
to undergo surgery five times during 1936 and 1937. He spent part of his con-
valescence in Cambridge, in J. J.’s Trinity home, rather than in London. Due to
this long illness, ‘I was in bed when I heard that C. J. Davisson and I had been
jointly awarded a Nobel Prize [of 1937] for the discovery of electron diffraction.
This was an excellent tonic, but it was decided that it would be unwise to go for
the formalities of the presentations on December 10th’ (G. P. Thomson, 1966,
p. 88). He was not able to give his Nobel speech until the spring of 1938, when
he made a special trip to Stockholm. Interestingly, G. P. did no further work on
electron diffraction, but moved to the study of slow neutrons, artificial radio-
activity, and, in a matter of months, the dangerously promising field of artifi-
cial disintegration of nuclei and atomic energy. The last would eventually make
him the chairman of the MAUD committee in charge of exploring the possibil-
ities of Britain developing an atomic weapon during the World War II.

6.6 End of an epoch

On 3 February 1933, amidst the struggles of the Depression years, the

Cavendish Laboratory formally opened a new building for low-temperature and
magnetic research under the leadership of Pyotr Kapitza. Lord Rutherford, the
 6.6 End of an epoch 167

head of the laboratory for almost 15 years, had managed to obtain funds from
the Royal Society and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research
to expand the research capability in fundamental physics and to consoli-
date the laboratory as a world centre of experimental physics. The Cavendish
was savouring the fruits of success, after the so-called annus mirabilis of 1932
(Hughes, 2000). James Chadwick’s identification of the neutron, John Cockcroft
and John Walton’s nuclear disintegration, and Patrick Blackett’s experiments
on positrons, gave the laboratory unprecedented fame within and outside phys-
ics. The influential journalist J. G. Crowther, a good friend of the laboratory,
wrote in early 1934 that its ‘reputation had become magnificent beyond the
hope of sustainment but mortal expectation has been disproved by the last
thirteen years of its history’ (Crowther, 1934, p. 7). The Times reported nation-
wide on the opening of the Mond Laboratory, emphasising that Kapitza’s work
was ‘a striking example of the cooperation of several scientific bodies’, and that
scientific research was moving to a scale that ‘cannot be supported by the rela-
tively small income of an institution like the Cavendish Laboratory’ (The Times,
3 February 1933). The following day, The Times also underlined the importance
of pure research for the benefit and the welfare of the nation: ‘If careful plan-
ning can help scientific research, then the Mond Laboratory should increase
our knowledge of nature as notably as its neighbour, the Cavendish, has done;
and out of that new knowledge it is quite possible that new industries will arise
to bring comforts or further sources of power to man’ (4 February 1933). And in
a more popular way, the report in the Manchester Guardian, probably written by
Crowther, said: ‘Let the sceptics be assured. No doubt the tangible benefits of
this beautiful laboratory … should ultimately filter down to the buying public
in the shape of better dance music’ (The Manchester Guardian, 3 February 1933).
In his speech for the opening ceremony, the Chancellor of the University
and by then Lord President of the Council, Mr Stanley Baldwin, said:

The development of industry to-day is depending more and more

on the application of new ideas and discoveries in pure science, and
successful industrial research is ultimately dependent on the vigorous
prosecution of research in pure science with the object of adding to
our knowledge of the processes of nature and generally without regard
to any practical application. Experience has shown that many of the
most important applications of science to industry have resulted from
such fundamental researches (The Times, 4 February 1933).

The rhetoric of this speech emphasized the fact that pure research was not an
intellectual game of interest only to academic scientists. The welfare of the
people and the progress of society depended on pure research, since many
168 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

new commodities were the direct result of discoveries in fundamental science.

Thus, both industry and the state should finance the establishment of new sci-
entific facilities such as the Mond Laboratory. As we saw in the previous chap-
ter, the Great War had greatly changed the perception of scientific education
and research, making the progress of science part and parcel of national devel-
opment and security, and Rutherford, the new director of the Cavendish, man-
aged to capitalize on the new mood to obtain large-scale funding for research.
The school of radioactivists he built up in Cambridge during the 1920s was
partly a result of the new funding possibilities. He pushed for large-scale invest-
ment of public funds in pure science, with which he completely changed the
economic organisation of the Cavendish.
Around the time of the building of the Mond laboratory, old J. J. was still
influential at the Cavendish, and took part in the great campaign to justify
investment in apparently useless pure science. In several public lectures, he
depicted his own research as one that embodied the importance of pure sci-
ence for the social and economic development of the country. The discovery
of the tiniest particle in the world would have proved a mere curiosity were it
not, according to his line of argument, for the fact that it had spawned a large
industry, spanning domestic electricity and radio broadcasting that was now
creating a lot of jobs, promoting social progress:

One of the most remarkable things about modern physics is that

though it deals with the most recondite of phenomena, few branches
have led to such important practical applications. Could anything
seem at first sight less likely to be of practical utility than the
electron – yet it is now the foundation of a great industry employing
many men and much capital. It is the electron that makes long-
distance wireless possible, and enables one human being to instruct,
amuse or bore another at a range of thousands of miles [in reference
to his own broadcasting]. The application of X-rays and radium to
medicine and surgery has proved supremely important for saving life
and diminishing suffering, … These discoveries were made without
any thought of such applications, they illustrate the value of research
made solely for the purpose of advancing knowledge. It is discoveries
made in this way that create new industries and revolutionize old
ones (Thomson, 1930, p. 211).

We can discern the reference to industrial and economic output more expli-
citly in a recorded instructional documentary of October 1934, where he
says:
 6.6 End of an epoch 169

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that each scientific discovery

contains the germ of a new industry. Scientific discoveries are very
efficient means to creating employment. And instead of attempting to
reduce unemployment by reducing research, as some have suggested,
I think the best hope for a durable cure is to get the hair of the dog
that beat you and to go in for more and more research. In my opinion
it is in laboratories and not only in the Houses of Parliament that
the cure will be found (Institution of Electric Engineering, video
recording 1934).

Besides the obvious political and economic agenda of these and other state-
ments, J. J. remained, to the last days of his scientific life, attached to his elec-
tron and the waves it carried as sign of a possible inner structure. News was
coming from the Cavendish and elsewhere of new particles and new theories,
but none of these would have been possible without the electron. He liked
to be portrayed as the father of a generation that could listen to the radio,
use domestic electricity, and enjoy the many benefits of modern life, much
of which came from practical applications of his discovery of the electron.
Furthermore, he wanted to be seen as the father (or one of the fathers) of
modern physics, and not a member of the last generation of what some began
to refer to as classical physics. The discovery of the electron was a major step
in the history of physics, akin to the breakthroughs of people like Galileo,
Newton, Dalton and Maxwell. In the popular lecture broadcast on the BBC in
January 1930 already referred to, he stated that ‘the electron is the keystone of
Modern Physics, and direct research on its properties one of the most import-
ant fields of research’. Furthermore, and to emphasize the continuity of the
physics of the 1930s with the previous tradition, he stressed that ‘the recent
discovery of electronic waves, and the modification in the theories which it
involves, is an indication that these are still fluctuating, and that one who
writes about the tendencies of modern physics is liable to find his views out
of date almost before they can be published’ (Thomson, 1930, p. 211). J. J.
thought the last battle had not yet been fought, one that would preserve the
old physics, since new knowledge and new discoveries would prove the con-
tinuity between the new and the old.
His last years were quiet and peaceful in the Master’s Lodge of Trinity College,
fulfilling his duties at the college, which basically involved just social events.
He now found time to look after the garden (botany having been a passion of
his since his childhood) and to write his memoirs, which were published just
before his eightieth birthday, in 1936. Thereafter, his memory and his mental
170 The electron in Aberdeen: from particle to wave

abilities began to decline. J. J. was the last in a long series of Masters of Trinity
College to remain in office for life, a centuries-old tradition that changed with
his successor, George Macaulay Trevelyan. Thus, he stayed in the Master’s
Lodge of the college until his death on 30 August 1940. His ashes were soon
afterwards buried in Westminster Abbey, close to the memorials of Newton,
Herschel, Kelvin, and Rutherford.
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 Index

Adams Prize, 29, 37, 38, 39 Berzelius, J. J., 137 charge-to-mass ratio of the
Adams, J. C., 26, 37 Birtwistle, G., 154 corpuscle, 79, 81, 82,
affinity, 39, 47, 48, 69, 87, Blackett, P., 151, 167 105, 114
137, 141 Bohr, N., 4, 130, 131, 140, chemical bonding, 2, 3, 5,
Arrhenius, S., 31, 140 141, 142, 149, 155 48, 94, 131, 137–40
Arsenieva, A. N., 165 Born, M., 149, 150 Claussius, R., 88
Aston, F., 126–7, 130, 132 Bragg, W. L., 131, 148, 153, Cockcroft, J., 167
atomic structure, 2, 79, 90, 164 Cox, C. G., 165
91, 123, 124, 132, 141, Crookes, W., 34, 36, 44, 98,
157 Campbell, N. R., 121 136
analogy of gyrostats, 69 cathode rays, 1–2, 3, 34, 36, Crowther, J. G., 17, 31, 41,
and chemical bonding, 80, 91, 110, 146 167
137–8 and conduction of Cunningham, J. A., 72
and corpuscles, 96 electricity, 82–3
and Faraday tubes, 94 and electron diffraction, Dalton, J., 9–10, 12, 15, 17,
and Helium nuclei, 107 151–6, 165 87, 89, 169
and neutral doublets, 122 and positive rays, 104, Darwin, C. G., 131, 153, 155,
and positive 128, 145 156, 161–4
electrification, 107, 129 and the corpuscle- Darwin, G. H., 39
and radioactivity, 116, 130 electron, 81, 91 Davisson, C. J., 150, 165, 166
and the nature of light, and X-rays, 4, 74–6, Davy, H., 62, 137
103 114–15, 118 de Broglie, L., 4, 102, 146,
as a consequence of the Cayley, A., 26 147, 148, 149, 150, 153,
structure of electricity, Chadwick, J., 167 156, 157, 158, 160, 163
92, 108 charge-to-mass ratio of de Broglie, principle, 102,
cathode rays, 78 146, 149, 150, 154, 158,
Baldwin, S., 167 charge-to-mass ratio of 163
Barker, T., 14, 16 positive rays, 104, 106, Dewar, J., 49, 50, 52, 53, 90
Barkla, C. G., 72, 100 127, 130 Dirac, P. A. M., 113, 160

183
184 Index

Drude, P., 102 and the structure of light, Jeans, J., 124–6
Dymond, E. G., 151, 152 119, 123, 146 Joffé, A. F., 165
and the structure of the Jones, M., 143
Eckart, C., 165 atom, 94 Joule, J., 10–11, 13
Einstein, A., 114, 119, 120, and X-rays, 115–16, 117
121, 122, 149 used by G. P. Thomson, Kapitza Club, 145, 160
electric charge 150 Kapitza, P., 166, 167
atomicity, 2, 91 Faraday, M., 62, 137 Kaufmann, W., 81
electric discharge in tubes, Fawcett, P., 71 Kaye, G., 126
3, 44, 55–60, 104, 106, Ferrers, N., 42 Kikuchi, S., 165
137, 152 Fisher, H., 137 Kurrelmeyer, B., 165
electrolysis, 31, 44, 61, 62, Fittig, R., 43
66, 67, 70, 77, 84, 102, FitzGerald, G. F., 39, 40, 85 Ladenburg, E., 117, 118, 119
103, 137 Fowler, R. H., 146 Lamb, H., 143
electron camera, 165 Frank, J., 149 Langmuir, I., 138, 141
electron diffraction, 1, 3, 4, Frankland, E., 15, 89 Larmor, J., 28, 33, 35, 42, 84,
5, 148, 151–6, 157, 158, Fraser, C. G., 144, 152, 153, 85, 112, 124, 156
160, 163–6 165 Lenard, P., 75, 76, 77, 78,
Ellis, C. D., 145, 149 80, 116
Elsasser, W., 149, 150 Geikie, A., 136 Lewis, G. N., 138, 139–41, 142
ether, 2, 3, 12, 17, 27, 39, Germer, L. H., 150, 165, 166 Liveing, G., 43, 46–9, 50, 51,
59, 60, 66, 67, 84, 85, Glaisher, J. W. L., 26 52, 53, 90
92, 93, 94, 96, 101, 112, Glazebrook, R., 33, 42, 43, Lockyer, N., 79, 80, 90, 142
116, 118, 119, 121, 125, 53, 54, 73, 110, 111, Lodge, O., 98, 103, 104, 125
156, 159 143, 144 Lorentz, H. A., 85, 156
and Faraday tubes, 64–6, Goldstein, E., 34
81, 92, 93, 116 Grotthus chain, 62, 63, 66, Mathematical Tripos, 3, 25,
and G. P. Thomson, 162, 69, 102 41, 46, 55, 114, 124,
163 Grotthus, T., 62 126, 143
and spiritualism, 18–21, 96 attempts to reform it,
and vortex-rings, 37 Hardy, G. H., 112, 124 52–4
as ultimate reality, 2, 38, Heisenberg, W., 155, 160, G. P. Thomson as
41, 64, 94, 101, 119, 162 undergraduate, 111–12
125, 146, 157 Helmholtz, H., 32, 37, 64, 137 influence in Owens
in Maxwell’s Treatise, Herman, R. A., 143 College, 16–17
27–8, 58, 114 Herschel, J., 21 influence on J. J. Thomson,
in Victorian science, 6, 8 Hertz, H., 32, 60, 61, 75, 76, 30–2, 33–6
Everett, J. D., 51 77, 78, 80, 114 J. J. Thomson as
Ewing, J. A., 53, 54 Hicks, W., 41, 64 undergraduate, 21–2,
Hopkinson, J., 14 23–4, 28
Faraday tubes, 2, 3, 41, 60, Hull, A., 141 Maxwell, J. C., 21, 24, 25, 26,
62, 63–70, 81, 84, 94, 96, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32,
101, 107, 129, 147, 148 Image, J. M., 24 33, 34, 41, 42, 44, 45,
and chemical bonding, Innes, P. D., 117 50, 57, 62, 64, 85, 143,
140 isotopes, 132, 150 169
 Index 185

on atoms and molecules, for chemical bonding, Rose, D. C., 165

86–90 138, 141 Routh, E., 24, 25, 30, 34
Maxwell’s theory, 27, 32, for electric discharge, 36, Rupp, E., 165
34, 35, 36, 45, 55, 60, 59, 61–3, 66, 75, 83 Rutherford, E., 72, 73, 76,
63, 65, 66, 70, 116, 122, for positive rays, 105, 77, 82, 100, 103, 110,
156 126 132, 142, 143, 145, 166,
McClung, R., 116 for radiation, 123 168, 170
McClelland, J. A., 72, 74, for the atom, 101, 137
76, 82 for the corpuscle, 83 Schorlemmer, C., 16, 89
McIlwraith, C. G., 165 Physical Sciences, 5, 30, 41, 43, Schrödinger, E., 4, 146, 150,
McLennan, J., 72 44, 45, 46, 49, 52, 54, 154, 155, 162
Mond, F., 143 79, 137 Schuster, A., 29, 31, 36, 42,
Myers, F., 20, 97, 98 Planck, M., 5, 120, 122, 123, 43, 44, 57, 64, 75, 76
124, 153, 158 Searle, G. F. C., 33, 73
Natural Science Tripos, 21, 22, Poincaré, H., 124, 125 Shaw, W. N., 43, 53
46, 112 positive rays, 3, 4, 5, 104–8, Shorlemmer, C., 15
attempts to reform itmt, 122, 126–32, 138, 141, Sidgwick, H., 97, 98, 99
52–4 142, 144, 145, 146, 150, Smith, G. A., 145
Nernst, W., 140 151, 154 Society for Psychical
Nishikawa, S., 165 Poynting, J. H., 31, 33, 64, 65, Research, 20
Niven, C., 143 110, 126 Sommerfeld, A., 115, 142
Niven, W. D., 25, 34, 45, 143, Prout, W., 79, 80, 87 spectroscopy, 15, 79, 89,
144 Pye, W. G., 110 127, 162
Nobel Prize, 81, 110, 150, Spens, W., 143
153, 166 quantum of light, 119, 121, spiritualism, 8, 96–9
147 Stark, J., 120
Ostwald, W., 31, 140 quantum theory, 2–5, 100, Stewart, B., 16–21, 30, 38,
Owens College, 14–18, 21, 112, 114, 126, 131, 140, 52, 97
29, 30, 31, 36, 38, 49, 142, 146, 147, 150, 156, Stokes, G. G., 21, 26, 27, 114
89 157, 158, 159, 160 Stoney, G. J., 84
chemistry in, 15–16 and G. P. Thomson, 154–6, Stuart, J., 52, 53
161–6 Szczeniewski, A., 165
Palladino, E., 98, 99 in Cambridge, 124
Patterson, A. L., 165 Tait, P. G., 19–21, 37, 97
Pattison Muir, M. M., 44, Rayleigh, Lord (J. W. Strutt), Taylor, G. I., 105, 106, 132,
49–50 1, 13, 17, 31–3, 41, 146
Pearce, E. C., 143 42, 43, 71, 73, 98, The Unseen Universe, 18–21,
Perrin, J., 78 104, 110 38
physical chemistry, 5, 31, Reid, A., 152, 153, 160 Thomson, F. (J. J.’s brother),
50, 51, 140 relativity, 125 12, 13
physical model, 30, 34, 63, Reynolds, O., 16, 17, 39, 42 Thomson, J., 71, 110
79, 81, 89, 102, 120, Roentgen rays, 75, 77, 83, Thomson, K. (Kathleen
123, 137, 158 118 Smith), 145
as intelligibility, 37, 55–7, Roentgen, W., 74, 76 Thomson, Mrs (Rose
61, 68, 90, 113, 125 Roscoe, H. E., 15, 16, 42 Paget), 71
186 Index

Thomson, T., 87 vortex rings, 20, 37, 38, 39, X rays, 82, 100, 110,
Thomson, W., 19, 21, 37, 48, 57–66, 69, 79, 81, 86, 126, 153, 161, 165,
41 101, 137 168
Threlfall, R., 43, 49, 51 and electron diffraction,
Townsend, J. S., 12, 72 Wallace, A. R., 98 153–4, 160
Trevelyan, G. M., 170 Walton, J., 167 and the nature of light,
Trinity College, 5, 14, 16, Weber, W., 84 114–19
21, 22, 25, 29, 34, 42, Whewell, W., 21, 44, 47, 48 their role in the discovery
52, 97, 98, 121, 124, Wiechert, E., 81 of the electron, 3, 4,
132, 143, 169 Wien, W., 104, 105 73–8, 107
Turnbull, H. W., 111 Wilson, C. T. R., 74, 110, 143
Wilson, H. A., 82 Zeeman, P., 81, 91
van’t Hoff, J. H., 31 Wood, A., 111, 143 Zeleny, J., 82
von Laue, M., 153 Wooster, W. A., 145 Zwicky, F., 165