730 • The Electron and the Atom

flight possible. All these, however, were but extensions of established

knowledge, they offered no promise of leading to anything radically
new.

THE E L E C T R IC A L D ISC H A R G E

The change was to come from the pursuit of neglected branches of

physics where there were effects not easy to fit into the classical picture,
yet apparently so unimportant that no serious doubt was felt as to their
ultimate incorporation. Among the first to break the crust of nineteenth-
century physical complacency was the study of the electrical discharge.
The phenomena of sparks, arcs, and brush discharges had always
seemed a vague and unmanageable, though fascinating, minor branch
of physics. In the middle of the nineteenth century they had attracted
some attention in connexion with the vogue for arc lighting, but this,
by the end of the century, seemed destined to give way to the incan­
descent filament. However, the electric discharge also manifested itself
brilliantly in vacua and, owing to the needs of the new electric-bulb
industry, there was a drive to improve vacuum technique. As a result
both of the revived interest and the new techniques several significant
new observations were made in the late nineteenth century. Many of
these did not seem explicable in terms of classical physics: Sir William
Crookes (1832-1919), in 1876, following observations of Faraday as far
back as 1838, observed a luminous glow stretching from the negative
end, the cathode, of a highly evacuated discharge tube. It seemed to
consist of particles of some sort, tom out of the cathode. He called these
cathode rays a new radiant form of matter. This was prophetic, for it
was from the study of many such high-speed or radiating particles that
the new physics was to be built.

R O N TG E N A N D X -R A Y S

Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911) glimpsed at this possibility and had

called the cathode rays electrons in 1894; Jean Perrin (1870-1942)
showed that they carried a negative charge (1895); J. J. Thomson (1856-
1940) measured their speed (1897). In November 1895, the trend of
research was abruptly changed by an accidental and altogether unfore­
seen discovery. Konrad von Rontgen (1845-1923), then an obscure
professor of physics at Wurzburg, had bought one of the new cathode-
ray discharge tubes with the object of elucidating its inner mechanism.
Within a week he had found that something was happening outside the
tube; something was escaping that had properties never before imagined
in Nature; something that made fluorescent screens shine in the dark