John Dalton proposed that elements were composed of tiny indestructible particles, atoms of an

element were identical in all aspects such as weight and atoms of different elements differed in these
aspects.

J.J. Thompson used a cathode ray tube to show the discovery of cathode rays.

At one end there was a pale green light appearing at the end of the glass tube near the anode. The tube
contained a gas at low pressure. When a high voltage was applied across the electrodes a pale green
light appeared on the end of the glass tube near the anode. They determined later that these invisible
rays were coming from the cathode to the anode and were known as cathode rays.

Using a new experiment these beans of cathode rays were used to determine their behavior in an
electrostatic field. The beam was deflected away from the negative plate to the positive plate suggesting
that cathode rays were negatively charged.

Since electrons were negatively charged, Thomson proposed that the neutral atoms from which they
case must have has a positive charge. Thus he proposed a model of an atom in which electrons were
distributed in a positive cloud. He called it the Plumpudding model. The pudding represented positive
charge while the plum represented the negative charges embedded in the cloud.
Ernest Rutherford designed a now famous experiment to test the Plumpudding model