


Of course, history is always more muddled than that. Thomson is often hailed as the discoverer of the electron based on that lecture 125 years ago. Corpuscles are electrons, and the plum pudding model gave way to Ernest Rutherford’s nuclear model in 1911. Thomson, who merely endorsed the idea.Ĭorpuscles and pudding are not how we think about the structure of an atom today. The model also became known as the Thomson model, although its chief proponent was William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), not J.J. In Thomson’s analogy, negatively charged corpuscles were like raisins suspended in a positively charged cake, resulting in a neutral atom. This model of the atom became known as the “plum pudding” model, so named for the popular English dessert.

Thomson described his experiments with cathode rays to verify the existence of these subatomic corpuscles. “The atoms of the ordinary elements are made up of corpuscles and holes, the holes being predominant,” he continued. Thomson, during a lecture at the Royal Institution in London, on 30 April 1897. “We shall call such particles corpuscles,” announced the physicist J.J.
