Atomic Theory Timeline

  • 400 BCE

    Democritus

    Democritus
    He discovered atom around 400 B.C.E . , He was an greek philosopher that thought that all matter is composed of indivisible elements
  • Lavoisier

    Lavoisier
    He established the law of conservation of mass, determined that combustion and respiration are caused by chemical reactions with what he named “oxygen,”
    Between 1772 and 1794
  • Dalton

    Dalton
    The total pressure of a mixture of gases amounted to the sum of the partial pressures that each individual gas exerted while occupying the same space. In 1803
  • Eugen Goldstein

    Eugen Goldstein
    In 1886 he discovered what he termed Kanalstrahlen, or canal rays, also called positive rays; these are positively charged ions that are accelerated toward and through a perforated cathode in an evacuated tube.
  • Becquerel

    Becquerel
    Discovered xrays in 1896..
  • J.J Thomson

    J.J Thomson
    On April 30, 1897, British physicist J.J. Thomson announced his discovery that atoms were made up of smaller components
  • Rutherford

    Rutherford
    He discovered radon in 1900 , radon was an radioactive element
    He found that the atom consists mostly of empty space, with its mass concentrated in a central positively charged nucleus
  • Planck

    Planck
    Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist who discovered the quantum of action, now known as Planck's constant, h, in 1900
  • Millikan

    Millikan
    In 1910 Robert Millikan succeeded in precisely determining the magnitude of the electron's charge.
  • Bohr

    Bohr
    a model of the atom in which the electron was able to occupy only certain orbits around the nucleus. In 1913
  • De Broglie

    De Broglie
    1924 Louis de Broglie introduced the idea that particles, such as electrons, could be described not only as particles but also as waves.
  • Schrodinger

    Schrodinger
    Erwin Shrodinger described how electrons move in wave form, and developed the Schrodinger equation which describes how the quantum state of a system changes with time. He discovered in 1926
  • Heisenberg

    Heisenberg
    In february 1927 , Werner heisnberg developed a key piece of quantum theory
  • james chadwick

    james chadwick
    discovery of the neutron in 1932.