Sir Joseph John (J.J.) Thompson: A Short Biography

Electronics Pioneers & History
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Joseph John Thompson (also known as J.J. Thomson) was a British physicist born on December 18, 1856, in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England. He is best known for his discovery of the electron, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906.

Thompson studied at Owens College in Manchester and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1884. He held a number of academic positions throughout his career, including professorships at the University of Cambridge and the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London.

Thompson's most famous experiment involved the use of a cathode ray tube, which allowed him to demonstrate the existence of negatively charged particles, which he called electrons. He also discovered that these particles had a much smaller mass than previously believed, and he proposed a model of the atom known as the "plum pudding" model, in which electrons were embedded in a positively charged sphere.

Thompson made many other contributions to the field of physics throughout his career, including work on the nature of X-rays, the behavior of gases at low pressures, and the measurement of the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. He is also credited for first proposing waveguide transmission of electromagnetic waves in a cylindrical metal cavity.

Thompson died on August 30, 1940, in Cambridge, England, at the age of 83. He is remembered as one of the most important physicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his work laid the foundation for many later discoveries in the field of particle physics.

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