The History Of The Atom Essay Research

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THE HISTORY OF THE ATOM

I am doing my project on the history of the atom. The atom was not just thought up overnight it took thousands of years of research and experimenting, but was finally finalized bty Dalton. Dalton was curious about many things but most of all he wondered how substances combined. He discovered that if you combine two substance, you got a new completely different substance. After years of experimenting he came up with the law of multiple proportions.

From this Dalton concluded that all matter was made out of atoms which where indivisible.. They could be separated from each other or combined to form new substances. Dalton also assumed that if two elements combined to make one compound, that compound consisted of one atom of each element. All this was just and assumption by Dalton and he didn’t have scientific enough equipment to verify this, later scientists found out that some of his assumptions where incorrect. Like the particles is gas are not close together and the atom is far from indivisible.

Dalton was known as the great experimenter and he based most of his work on other peoples conclusions. But he did come up with many historical changes theories like the atomic theory

The different parts of the atom like the electron, proton and neutron where found by different people. The electron was discovered by scientists who’s main interests where electricity rather then chemistry. The proton was also discovered by a group of scientists. A proton a single unit of positive charge and is 1840 times heavier then an electron. The proton is what remains when a hydrogen atom is stripped of an electron.

In 1932 Sir James Chadwick confirmed yet another subatomic particle, the neutron. Neutrons are subatomic particles with no charge. But there mass is nearly equal to the proton.

In conclusion an atom is made of three parts electrons, protons and the neutron, all of these are equally important and a necessity to complete an atom.