Stoney's Atomic Theory Essay

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Although the atomic theory was developed in increments, George Johnston Stoney is most famous for contributing the term electron: fundamental unit quantity of electricity. Stoney would develop the concept fourteen years before he coined the term electron. He also made contributions to the theory of gasses, cosmic physics, and estimated the number of molecules in a cubic millimeter of gas.
After being educated at Trinity College Dublin he moved to Queens University in Dublin where he worked as the Secretary of the Administrative Headquarters of the Queens Colleges. It was then when he produced his most important conceptions and calculations. His particular theory was that electrical charges in atoms are comprised of negatives which he would call electrons. He calculated the magnitude of a particle of electricity, or Stoney Unit which he would later name the electron in one of his papers in the Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society in 1891. The path taken to get to Stoney Units utilized the Stoney Scale which was the mathematical equation he developed to get his desired answer when …show more content…

His data he from his experiments led to the discovery of the physical electron in an atom by J.J. Thomson at Cambridge around 1898, and was H.A. Lorentz’s baseline for his formal theory on the existence of the electron. In his Nobel Lecture in 1902 Lorentz would go on to acknowledge and credit Stoney for his contributions to his study. His discoveries changed the way others looked at the atomic structure. He received an honorary Doctorate of Science (D.Sc.) from the University of Dublin in June 1902 just 9 years before he died at the age of eighty-five. The lasting impact of his work is acknowledged even today because he aided in the advancement of the atomic theory by providing a new piece to the incomplete atomic

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