The AtomIn the spring of 1897, JJ Thomson demonstrated that the beam of incandescent matter in a cathode ray tube was not made up of light waves, as held by "the almost unanimous opinion of physicists Germans. Rather, the cathode rays were negatively charged particles that bubbled out of the negative cathode and were attracted to the positive anode. These particles could be deflected by an electric field and bent into curved paths by a magnetic field. They were much lighter than hydrogen atoms and were identical "whatever gas the discharge passed through" if gas was introduced into the tube. Since they were lighter than the lightest known type of matter and identical regardless of the type of matter from which they arose, it follows that they must be a basic constituent part of matter, and they were a part, so there must be a whole. The real physical electron implied a real physical atom: the particle theory of matter was therefore for the first time convincingly justified by physical experiment. They sang the hit at the annual Cavendish dinner. Armed with the electron and knowing from further experiments that what was left when electrons were removed from an atom was a much more massive and positively charged remainder, Thomson continued over the next decade to develop a model of the atom that came to be called the “plum pudding” model. Thomson's atom, "a number of negatively electrified corpuscles enclosed in a sphere of uniform positive electrification" like raisins in a pudding, was a hybrid: particle electrons and a diffuse remainder. It was used to demonstrate mathematically that electrons could be arranged in astable configurations within an atom and that mathematically stable arrangements could explain the similarities and regularities between chemical elements displayed on the periodic table. It became clear that electrons were responsible for the chemical affinities between elements, that chemistry was ultimately electrical. Thomson narrowly missed the discovery of were likely to be fogged up and he simply asked his assistant to move them to another location. Thomson noticed that the glass tube placed "at a distance of a few feet from the discharge tube" fluoresced just as the wall of the tube itself did when bombarded with cathode rays, but he was too busy studying the rays themselves to search for the cause. Rontgen isolated the effect by covering his cathode ray tube with black paper. When a nearby display of fluorescent material was still glowing, he realized that whatever was causing the glow,