according as the intensity of the electric field is supposed to present, or not, a discontinuity when it crosses the surface which limits the volume occupied by the electron. Inertia, of electromagnetic origin, which we are about to refer to a similar centre, is opposed also, under the difficulty of its becoming infinite, to the hypothesis of a finite electric charge condensed in a point without extension.
The various considerations, more and more precise, all converging toward this notion of the atomic structure of charges, form the starting-point of all recent works on electricity.
II. The Atom of Electricity
(6) The Electron. The remarkable laws of electrolysis discovered by Faraday establish an intimate and necessary connection between the atomic structure of matter and that of electricity. They were sufficient to lead Helmholtz to conceive the latter as constituted of distinct, indivisible portions, elements of charge, all identical from the point of view of the quantity of electricity which they carry, and differing only in the sign. This elementary charge is equal to that carried by a monovalent atom or radical in electrolysis; a polyvalent atom or radical carries an equivalent number of such charges.
It was Johnstone Stoney who first used the word electron to designate atoms of electricity as distinct from matter, with which they combine to furnish the electrolytic ions. The presence of similar electrons combined with material atoms allows us to represent certain peculiarities of the spectrum, the existence of doublets of like frequencies; the electron, in motion, is thus considered as the origin of the emission of all luminous rays.
(7) Gaseous Conductors. But there are the researches on the electrical conductivity of gases, which have presented to us in a forcible manner the idea of electrical atoms, which have made this notion more tangible by allowing us to count these electric centres, to lay hold of them individually, and to measure for the first time the charge of each of them in absolute value.
As early as 1882, Giese, in observing the peculiarities of the conductivity of gases escaping from flames, the departure from Ohm's law, the impossibility of drawing from the gas, whatever might be the electric field employed, more than a limited amount of electricity of each kind, the progressive recombination of the free charges in the gas, had expressed in a precise manner the idea, that as in electrolytes the free electric charges in a gas are carried by distinct positive and negative centres in limited numbers, capable of moving in opposite directions under the action of an external electric field in order to discharge the electrified body which produces the field.
It is difficult, in fact, to conceive how, on the hypothesis that the
