![]() His parents planned to enrol him as an apprentice engineer to Sharp, Stewart & Co, a locomotive manufacturer, but these plans were cut short when his father died in 1873. Thomson began experimenting with contact electrification and soon published his first scientific paper. In 1870, he was admitted to Owens College in Manchester (now University of Manchester) at the unusually young age of 14 and came under the influence of Balfour Stewart, Professor of Physics, who initiated Thomson into physical research. His early education was in small private schools where he demonstrated outstanding talent and interest in science. Thomson was a reserved yet devout Anglican. He had a brother, Frederick Vernon Thomson, who was two years younger than he was. His father, Joseph James Thomson, ran an antiquarian bookshop founded by Thomson's great-grandfather. His mother, Emma Swindells, came from a local textile family. Joseph John Thomson was born on 18 December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, Lancashire, England. Only Arnold Sommerfeld's record of mentorship offers a comparable list of high-achieving students. Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford (Chemistry 1908), Lawrence Bragg (Physics 1915), Charles Barkla (Physics 1917), Francis Aston (Chemistry 1922), Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (Physics 1927), Owen Richardson (Physics 1928) and Edward Victor Appleton (Physics 1947). Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases. His experiments to determine the nature of positively charged particles, with Francis William Aston, were the first use of mass spectrometry and led to the development of the mass spectrograph. Thomson is also credited with finding the first evidence for isotopes of a stable (non-radioactive) element in 1913, as part of his exploration into the composition of canal rays (positive ions). ![]() In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively charged particles (now called electrons), which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large charge-to-mass ratio. One of his best-known students was Ernest Rutherford, who succeeded Thomson as Cavendish Professor of Physics.Sir Joseph John Thomson OM FRS (18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was a British physicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics, credited with the discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found. Seven of his research assistants, as well as his own son, went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Thomson's greatest contribution to science to be his role as a teacher. Thomson published an important monograph in 1913 urging the use of the mass spectrograph in chemical analysis. His atomic theory helped explain atomic bonding and the structure of molecules. Thomson was closely aligned with chemists of the time.These experiments led to the development of the mass spectrograph. Thomson also investigated the nature of positively-charged particles.The son, Sir George Paget Thomson, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937. In 1890, Thomson married one of his students, Rose Elisabeth Paget.So, Joseph John attended Owens College in Manchester, and then Trinity College in Cambridge, where he became a mathematical physicist. to be an engineer, but the family did not have the funds to support the apprenticeship. In 1906, Thomson demonstrated a hydrogen atom had only a single electron. ![]()
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