"If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays."

"The difficulties which would have to be overcome to make several of the preceding experiments conclusive are so great as to be almost insurmountable."

"As the cathode rays carry a charge of negative electricity, are deflected by an electrostatic force as if they were negatively electrified, and are acted on by a magnetic force in just the way in which this force would act on a negatively electrified body moving along the path of these rays, I can see no escape from the conclusion that they are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter."

"Thomson's lecture drew from Fitz Gerald the suggestion that "we are dealing with free electrons in these cathode rays"—a remark the point of which will become more evident when we come to consider the direction in which the Maxwellian theory was being developed at this time."

"J. J. Thomson, by a rotating-mirror method, succeeded in measuring the velocity of the cathode rays, finding it to be 1.9 x 107 cm./sec.; a value so much smaller than that of the velocity of light that it was scarcely possible to conceive of the rays as vibrations of the aether."

"Thomson and then his young men demolished a recurrent scientific myth—one that had surfaced again in the 1870's: that there was nothing left to be discovered, nothing new under the sun. Part of the immutable wisdom of the day, endorsed and believed long before the greatest of scientists, Isaac Newton, was a kind of billiard ball theory of the atom, which went back to the ancient Greeks. The word itself is from the Greek atomos, meaning "inidivisible.""

"Notes on Recent Researches in Electricity and Magnetism, published in 1883, had won him enough acclaim at the age of twenty-seven that he was named director of the [Cavendish] laboratory the next year."

"Thomson's work suggested an alternative version—the instability of matter—to that of the indivisible atom. It was revolutionary stuff."