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Dalton's model
John Dalton created the billard ball model. Dalton believed that atoms make up matter and that particles are too small to see. He thought that each element had its own specific type of atom and compounds were created when different atoms combined. Also he believed that atoms couldn’t be created or destroyed. John Dalton also wrote a paper on colour blindness and did lots of research on it. -
Thomson's Model
Joseph John or J.J. Thompson suggested a model of an atom and called it the plum pudding model. He thought that the atom had tiny particles floating inside it called electrons which had a very little mass and were charged negatively. The rest of the model was positively charged. J.J called it the plum pudding model because the electrons look like the raisons in the plum pudding and the positively charged part was like the cake. Thompson received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1906. -
Rutherford's model
Ernest Rutherford discovered a different model of the atom in 1911 and called it the solar system model. His model was similar to Thompson’s but he thought the atom was almost all empty space but there was a positively charged nucleus in the center and negative particles were surrounding it. Rutherford won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1908 and was the first ever person in Canada to win that type of award. -
Bohr's Model
Neils Borh created a new model of an atom in 1913 which was very similar to Rutherford’s model. He also thought that there was a positively charged nucleus in the center of the atom but he thought that instead of electrons being anywhere in the atom they were in orbits around the nucleus. Borh thought the electrons had special positions around the nucleus called orbits or shells. Borh got to travel to Cambridge, England where he got to follow the laboratory work of J.J. Thompson. -
Quantum Model
The Quantum Model is an atom that has a nucleus that is filled with protons (positive particles) and neutrons (neutral particles) and are surrounded by electrons (negative particles) that are in different clouds at different energy levels. The electrons don’t move around the atom and you can’t determine the location of the electron. The Quantum model shows how electrons move randomly in electron clouds called orbits.
