Unknown

History of the Atom

  • Dalton

    Dalton
    John Dalton proposed an atomic theory.
    His theory was:
    1) All matter is composed of extremely small particles called atoms.
    2) atoms of an element are identical in size, mass, and other properties (atoms of different elements differ in size, mass, etc.) 3) Atoms cannot be subdivided, created or destroyed,
    4) Atoms of different elements combine in simple whole-number ratios to form chemical compounds.
    5) In chemical reactions, atoms are combiined, separated, or rearranged.
  • Thomson

    Thomson
    J.J. Thomson proposed the Plum Pudding Model for the structure and placement of electrons and protons throughout the atom.
  • Millikan

    Millikan
    Robert Millikan measured the charge of the electron; this lead to the conclusionn that an atom is around two-thousandth the mass of a hydrogen atom.
  • Rutherford

    Rutherford
    Ernest Rutherford discovered the densely packed bundle in the atom: He called it the nucleus, and he concluded that the volume of the nucleus must be extremely small compared to the rest of the atom.
  • Bohr

    Bohr
    Niels Bohr proposed that electrons don't spiral into the nuclues; He said that electrons ccan only orbit certain distances from the nucleus, and energy is created when the electrons go from a high orbit to a lower one (atoms also aborb energy)
  • Moseley

    Moseley
    Henry Moseley used rays to find the frequencies of many elements. This helped him to find the true atomic number. He was the founder of Mosely's law, which has to do with how the number of protons influences the atomic number.
  • Aston

    Aston
    Francis Aston invented the mass spectrograph, and he was the first to observed isotopes.
  • Pauli

    Pauli
    Wolfgang Pauli hypothesized that electrons spin while orbiting the nucleus. He also stated that not two electrons can have the same set of quantum numbers
  • Broglie

    Broglie
    Louis de Broglie came up with the idea that atoms can move in wave form (matter waves).
  • Schrödinger

    Schrödinger
    Erwin Schrödinger built a model to explain how atoms could move in circular waves (particle waves were in a round shape, and there are unstable and stable waves).
  • Heisenberg

    Heisenberg
    Werner Heisenberg created the Heisenberg uncertainty law, which states that when someone measures the certainty of the position of an atom, the uncertainty in its momentum increases. Or that is the momentum is known, the location is hard to determine.
  • Dirac

    Dirac
    Paul Dirac dscovered equations that led to the founding of a positively charged electron called the positron.
  • Chadwick

    Chadwick
    James Chadwick dicovered the neutron, which he found was heavier than a proton
  • Meitner

    Meitner
    Lise Meitner helped to verify that heavy elements capture neutrons and form unstable products which undergo fission (fission chain reaction).
  • Fermi

    Fermi
    Enrico Fermi was the first to cunduct a successful chain reaction by releasing energy from atoms in the nucleus.