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 poor whale to throw it out, it gets only larger, and may reach impressive size. After the death of the poor animal, the stone gets released in 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 application and no explanation for this form of electricity.
We have to stand still with this a little bit. It was not just Thomas Edison, who was shown the first electron tube, and he saw no application for it, so he put this invention aside for many years (yes, this is really so!). 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. 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. No he did not! He just invented a low rpm 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, by wars of several kind. 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. Think of persons like Edison, or Nikolai Tesla. They just lived from being an inventor. Everything scientists needed, it was all there. Literature, universities, laboratories, special tools, and fine instruments. All of that existed. A nano-Ampere meter? Oh yes, it already 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. And it still rings, on it's first battery, of which we do not really know what is inside. Really, this is not a joke, you can look it up on youtube. Before electricity could be explained, they had already radio transmitters which worked without tubes, across the ocean. 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 stupid fantasies, and 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 interesting days. A good scientist could just discover something mew. Imagine yourself in this time, in a fully equipped university lab of those days. Doing scientific things was very trendy. 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". 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, what gas atoms are, why these can light up, what caused the specific in 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.
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 those 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 tought 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. 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 likes those small private sessions a lot more than class rooms. There was really nothing he could not tell a story about. Why I write this, 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. People knew, "something invisible" can go into a metal wire, and come out at the other end. Even just accepting "something flows", brings up more questions, like how does ''it'' get inside the wire, and how come "it" gets out at the other end, while metal is solid. Nothing can pass through solid metal. So isn't that magic? To produce electricity, they used wet batteries, or rubbed something to generate static charge. They had batteries, capacitors, coils, switches, anything. Just the nature of electricity, nobody knew it. It was clear by Stoney, these books are only partially right. While partially right, means at the same time: Partially wrong. There are some famous sayings by Stoney about this, such as: "A hypothesis is something you hope to be useful. A theory is something we hope to be true". With such books, students were taught by their professors "how electricity works".
And here comes George Johnstone Stoney, with bright and clean ideas. 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 the thing which flows is no continuous flow, but a flow of particles. Next full hit: He touched quantum mechanics here, without realizing it. 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. So was he wrong? You have to imagine the brilliancy of this discovery, in a scientific world, where he was the only person on earth, saying this.
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 comes out this energy which can spark or make things warm, and it went in the other end. So it sort of 'flows' and for that reason it was called current. Yet, in reality, no "current flows not from plus to minus", but electrons flow from minus to plus. Saying current flows from plus to minus, is as wrong as saying in a river current flows uphill instead of saying water flows downhill.
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 replace by better ones. This kicked aside many other views on "current" but there was 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 a 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.