George Johnstone Stoney
The man who predicted the electron
Believe it or not, but if pot wales would not have had stomach problems, electricity would have been called different.
A pot whale can sometimes develop a stomach stone. This is not a real stone, but some kind of hard composite, with a terrible bad stomach smell, and once the stone is too big for the whale to vomit it, it gets only larger and larger, eventually killing the whale. After the death of the poor animal, the stone gets released into the sea water, and sometimes reaches a beach or ends up in a fisher's net. These have a horrible smell, and look like a dirty stone. However when dried and cleaned, it becomes a dark yellow material which is used to make perfume of. The materials is named amber. It is as expensive as gold.
This material, once dried, turned out to have incredible good electrostatic properties, as people already found out, thousands of years ago. If rubbed with a cloth, it would charge up so much, that it gives a nice spark. This known effect was given the name "Electra" by the ancient Greek, which means "Amber". So these people discovered electricity, and gave it a name, but for 2500 years ever since, there was no explanation for this form of electricity, and also no application. But you see, they could already generate electricity by then.
We have to stand still with this a little bit. Thomas Edison was given the first electron tube in his hands by one of his employees, who discovered this by coincidence. Since in those days, there were so many new things invented, Edison saw not immediate application for this item, and it took decades before others picked this up, and made real working radio tubes from it. Sure Edison made great inventions, but he missed the greatest of all; The Radio Tube.
There have other been times in history too, when people discovered something extremely important, and had no idea of that, and forget about it for decades, or even 1000's of years. An extreme example for f this, is Heron of Alexandria, who 
invented the steam turbine, 2000 years ago. Imagine this, a working steam engine, and there was no application, no use, nothing.
He regarded it only a curiosity and a toy. He described it in his book "Pneumatics". (Picture here is from his very book). The disadvantage of his turbine was the very high rpm, and small torque, and there was just nothing you could do with it. You could have improved the torque, and lower the rpm, by making it larger, like 3 meter diameter, and not add two outlets on it, but 300. That would have given a primitive steam turbine with some use. Knowing this, I do not want to hear, James Watt invented the steam engine.
Over the centuries, there have always been times dominated by particular fields of science, music, literature and other forms of creativity. From time to time rolled over by Pandemics, or in the absence that, people start wars against other cultures. Nothing new.
Yet, the period from 1850 to 1900, was characterized by the greatest scientific progress ever. It was not unusual to be an inventor by profession. Just like persons as Edison, or Nikolai Tesla. They just lived from being an inventor. Everything a scientist needed, it was all there. Literature, universities, laboratories, special tools, and fine instruments. All of that existed.
The Oxford Electric Bell is an electric bell, made with dry batteries, at a time where people had no ideas whatsoever, what caused electricity. But that did not bother. The original was build in 1840. Almost two hundred years later now, it's original batteries are sill not empty. The bell still rings. Scientists are curious today, what is inside such batteries which can work for centuries, but there is only one original, and little is known about how it was made. Really, this is not a joke, you can look up "Oxford Electric Bell" on youtube.
Before electricity could be explained, they had even radio transmitters which worked without radio tubes. They could send messages across the ocean with that. There was so much invented, without knowing what electricity really is. Perhaps even today we do not really know what it is. We just use models. They had electric light, electricity generators, and so many other electric things. Only...., what makes these items work? What EXACTLY is electricity? They really had no idea at all. And most of all, they had wrong ideas, and not just a few. All of those explanations, they were all wrong as can be!
This is the time where we make small stop, in the year 1875, in England. Very many achievements existed already. The dentists used already an electric drill, there was gas light in the evening, and you could travel by rail road. For science, these were golden days Any good scientist could just discover something new. Doing scientific things was very trendy. Imagine yourself as a scientist, in such a laboratory. All instruments you need, are on the shelves. The drawers have all the tools and items you need. Special shops supply the materials, and a staff of technical assistants help you out, to set up your experiments and carry them out. Then, in such an environment, people speak about the many "strange" observations which can be made with electricity, but they don't know what it is.
We do have to make another small stop, at the so called "Geisler tubes". Pictured here on the left. They knew very well how to make them, it was a very fine developed art. Glas pipes could just be bought, glass blowing was nothing new. All you had to do, was add two electrodes to a glass pipe, fill it with gas, and pump it low vacuum. Then connect DC voltage from a stacked battery, and voila: A magic light begins to shine.
And still, they had no clue what electricity really is, No idea about gas atoms are, or how these can light up, what caused the specific color, and many more of those things which make the Geisler tubes what they are. But sure, those professors and scientists had a gut feeling, in what direction to search, knowing very well, a scientific discovery could be at the tip of their fingers. Here is some more about Geissler tubes.
Great inventions from 1850 to 1900, were things like: The typewriter, dynamite, movies, the combustion engine, electric trains, telephone, the gramophone and the light bulb. Sure not a boring period. All these scientific things like: Voltage, Current, Electrons, the periodic system, the speed of light, Radioactivity, X-Rays, Radio waves, and a lot more, it was all within such a close reach, as never before.
It was like a closed book, all you had to do is open it and start reading. And that's what many did. Scientists used to gather in clubs and societies, publish their findings, or patent them if possible. One of such scientists, was George Johnstone Stoney, the man who predicted the electron, and with this break through discovery, modern physics began.
The existence of the electron was predicted by professor George Johnstone Stoney in 1874.
Look at this picture, of this man smiling to us from a bygone world. But he knew so many things, which he tried to bring in relation to each other. He looks like a copy of my own chemistry teacher, a person who would tell such interesting stories, who composed commercial film music, and published several CDs with his own classical piano compositions, played by himself. This chemistry teacher formed my perception of science. He thought us, a technical problem is solved if you know first how collect the parameters. Sort out what you know, and what you don't know, and how to get to the solution, using a slide rule for the calculations. You had to be skilled in doing calculations in general. Though now 50 years ago, I still remember many of his lessons in detail, and also the "questioning time after" we sometimes spend privately with 3 or 4 of his students. He liked those small private sessions a lot more than full class rooms. There was really nothing he could not tell a story about. Why I write this? Well, actually the picture of George Johnstone Stoney struck me, because he looked so identical to him, and this is how I became interested in his Stoney, and then in his work.
Back to Stoney now.
Think of this time, where the nature of electricity was described fully wrong in every book. Totally wrong, and professors were teaching their students this nonsense. People knew, "something invisible" can go into a metal wire, and come out at the other end. They said something "flows", but that brings up even more questions. Like how does ''it'' get inside the wire, and how come "it" gets out at the other end? Nothing can pass through metal, when there is no hole inside. So isn't that magic? To produce electricity, they used wet batteries, or rubbed a piece of amber, or similar, to generate electrostatic charge. They had batteries, capacitors, coils, wires, switches, anything. Only one thing was missing.... The nature of electricity, nobody knew anything about it. It was clear by Stoney, the theory books are only partially right, when they all say something different. While partially right, means at the same time: Partially wrong.
There is the famous saying by Stoney about this: : "A hypothesis is something you hope to be useful. A theory is something we hope to be true".
He was the first, saying that particles consist of other particles. What a breakthrough idea that was. While experimenting on what he later called electrons, he found that whatever it is that flows in an electric wire, it not a continuous flow, but a flow of particles. Next full hit: He touched quantum mechanics here. I think quantum mechanics is one of the most miraculous things there is, described by great persons like Planck and Heisenberg. But the first one to predict it, his name was: George Johnstone Stoney.
So, these particles can charge objects. That he knew. He could not prove his sayings, but he had an estimation of the charge of an electron even though his number was a factor 16 too low. Such a brilliant discovery.
Before him, it was clear 'something' flows from plus to minus of a battery, and that was all. This was not a big achievement, everybody could see, at the end of a wire, some form of energy comes out of it. So it sort of 'flows' and for that reason it was called current.
Even today we call it 'current'.
So not 'current' flows through the wires, but something else must flow, Stoney said.
The answer was: ELECTRONS flow, and he calculated even their charge with only a factor 16 error. This is simply brilliant, because he was saying this in a world where nobody heard about before.
His findings were presented in 1874, and qualified 'interesting' by his fellow scientists. Well that is better than nothing. But soon others adopted his theory, which should be no surprise, because many things could be explained a lot better with his theory. Also people were used to wrong theories being replaced by better ones. This kicked aside many other views on "current" but there was still no practical application for it, and for the next 25 years it was regarded not interesting. Can you imagine that?!
But then things began to move.
It was interesting to experiment with Geissler tubes, though also here, not a soul knew where the light comes from. They did see something like beams or rays, and it was known you could deflect those with magnetic or electric fields. They tried to improve the "beam" by making it narrower by forcing it though a horizontal slot, and then a vertical slot. And that worked. You can see that below. The idea to put a positive voltage on those slots was only natural, and in an experimental way they ended up with the first oscilloscope tube, without realizing this. So did Wehnelt invent the CRT tube? No, of course not! He only invented the focus method.
More experiments by others
In those days it was trendy to experiment with cathode ray tubes, which today everybody will agree these are electron tubes. It must have been fun to work with, but imagine nobody understood the physics behind it. Though of course the prediction of George Johnstone Stoney, it were 'probably charged particles' was a break through. The item you see above, was used as a particle accelerator. You could repeat this experiment with an old but still working oscilloscope, which you scrap for the experiment. Just you need to find a way to get adjustable high voltage for the phosphorous screen, which also go above the original voltage. It gets even more interesting, when Thomson found out the particles (electrons) gain mass by acceleration. Even the formulas for that, E=MC^2 was proven later correctly by Poincare, based on this experiment, done with that very tube, pictured here. So the relation between mass and energy was discovered by Thomson. As you can see Thomsons name is written quite different from Einsteins, so I do not really understand why so many credit Einstein for this. I take a famous saying of Einstein: What makes you sure, what you say is true? Actually Einstein stole this saying from Socrates, but that makes it only more valid. |
How this tube works.
The tube itself is at low vacuum, and us gas filled, and the gas gives light in the invisible spectrum. So the phosphorous layer stays dark except for the spot where electrons hit. At the electric gun side, the gas pressure (or molecule density) is low enough to allow electrons to travel along the vacuum, without hitting too much gas atoms. Yet if one is hit, it gets ionized, and it falls apart in the positive ion and the negative electron . The positive ion travels to the negative cathode. As it hit the cathode with great energy, this releases new electrons, and a chain reaction begins if the cathode to anode voltage is high enough. So it 'fires' at a certain voltage. Through a small slot hole, a fraction of the electrons peep out with moderate speed. They would return to Anode1, as they are negatively charged, but the acceleration anode has an much higher voltage, and it wins. At the slot of the Acceleration anode, the electrons come out with very high speed. These electrons travel now decelerate until they hit the phosphorous layer, and it lights up. Many people played with such tubes, and an inventor as such is unknown.
To my opinion this is already an electron tube.
Joseph J. Thomson
The man who discovered relativity
In 1897, Joseph J. Thomson presented a practical proof of George Stoney's prediction, using the original cathode ray tube as pictured above. And right after he discovered relativity, when Einstein was still working as a clerk in the patent office. Looking at a piece of history... well this sure is one. If you think Fleming and von Lieben invented the electron tube, it means you think this cathode ray tube is not an electron tube.
Working with electrons may seem something logical today, but you need to see, this was in a time, where they only knew something flows from 'plus' to 'minus'. With that knowledge, which was even wrong, because electrons flow from minus to plus, Thomson had to work. Yet that didn't bother him, to prove electrons exist. He was able to determine the ratio between mass and charge of an electron, by at first deflect the bream electrically and then bring it back to the center by adding magnetic deflection. From this was resulting a ratio, as a plain number, which he could determine very precise. Of course this ratio included all the variables of his set up, like the number of coil windings and all kind of things. However it gave him a number.
As a second step, he increased the acceleration anode voltage by a certain factor, and in order to get the beam in the center again, that required another factor. Now that other factor can be derived from the first, if you know the change in anode voltage. Just results were not as he expected. There was something weird. If electrons get really fast, they gain weight! Discovered NOT by Einstein. Thomson's conclusion was, the ratio of mass to charge had increased. Just what caused it, was unknown to him. Now this was for the first time a scientist saw this, and even came up with an explanation, and an experimental formula. He said the change of mass, is caused by absorption of the electrical energy. Thus, presenting a relation between mass and energy.
In the end he Thomson came up with his experimental formula. E=3/4Mv².
Henri Poincaré
The man who proved relativity
Three years later, In 1900, a French mathematics genius, Henri Poincaré, could prove and correct Thomson's formula, it had to be E= Mv². So you see here, the relation between mass and velocity was discovered before and without Einstein. I read one of Einstein's books about general relativity, not understanding everything, but carefully looking for proof of E= Mc². Well he doesn't prove this at all. I call this a fraud by Einstein. E= Mc² can be derived by any first year math student, from the LORENTZ transformations, which six formulas describe how high velocity changes mass, time and space. Without those, there is no proof by Einstein of E= Mc². Einstein was criticized for this intellectual "theft" and after that added silently the Lorentz transformations under "references", in later versions of his books, carefully avoiding to credit Lorentz. Alternatively this can be derived from the Maxwell equations. My physics teacher needed one hour for that, and I wrote his texts off the black board, I still have these notes.
Quoted from Socrates: Do not believe without questioning, what people say. For instance if one says it is a virtue, to love the God ZEUS, then question his saying as follows. When exactly is something a VIRTUE? What exactly is LOVE. Why did he choose ZEUS? If he can not describe what virtue or love is, how can he say such things? Moreover, if he points out the God Zeus, this means there must be other Gods as well. Is it a virtue to love other Gods? If yes, for what reason does he mention ZEUS only? He called this methodical questioning. His method of asking proof for everything people say, unveiled many lies of people in high places, eventually leading to his death sentence.