The discovery of the electron was a complex and extended process, stretching from Faraday's investigation of electrolysis to Millikan's oil-drop experiments [18]. The results of four different fields (electrochemistry, electromagnetic theory, ► spectroscopy, and ► cathode rays) converged to support the existence of a novel subatomic constituent of matter. Faraday's experiments on electrolysis, interpreted from the perspective of the atomic theory of matter, implied that electricity has an atomic structure [4]. That is, electricity appears in naturally occurring units. In 1891 George Johnstone Stoney (1826–1911) named those units “electrons” ([13], p. 583, [30]).
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Arabatzis, T. (2009). Electrons. In: Greenberger, D., Hentschel, K., Weinert, F. (eds) Compendium of Quantum Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70626-7_62
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