Thomson Experiment

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In the nineteenth century many scientists were fascinated by Cathode ray tubes. When an electric current passes through a vacuum tube, a stream of glowing material can be seen; however the scientists did not have any idea why. J. J. Thomson noticed that the stream would bend toward a positively charged plate. He theorised that this stream was made from tiny sub-atomic particles with a negative charge he termed corpuscles, which were later renamed electrons.