G. Johnstone StoneyBorn 15 Feb 1826; died 5 Jul 1911 at age 85. George Johnstone Stoney was an Irish physicist who coined the term electron for the fundamental unit of electricity. At the Belfast meeting of the British Association in Aug 1874, in a paper: On the Physical Units of Nature, Stoney called attention to a minimum quantity of electricity. He wrote, “I shall express ‘Faraday's Law’ in the following terms ... For each chemical bond which is ruptured within an electrolyte a certain quantity of electricity traverses the electrolyte which is the same in all cases.” Stoney subsequently offered the name electron for this minimum electric charge. When J.J. Thomson identified cathode rays as streams of negative particles (1897), each carrying probably Stoney's minimum quantity of charge, the name was applied to the particle rather than the quantity of charge. |
