So what did J. J. Thompson tell us? He said the electrons were distributed throughout a uniformly charged positive sphere of atomic dimensions. So that's the text. Now let's make this cartoon, because that makes more sense. Visualize it a little bit better. So it looks a little bit like this. So here's a sphere of atomic dimension. Electrons are these tiny little things distributed throughout the positive sphere. And this is massive because the electrons have very, very low mass. And just to be clear, there are no protons. No protons. So this isn't positive. It's a positive chargeness. It's just a big positive blur. And then the little electrons inside. So the electrons are negative, and they're tiny and low-mass, and they're mobile. He didn't say much about how they move, but you can imagine that they move, and maybe they even spin. And so on. And this was known as the Plum Pudding Model.
There's a big cultural bias here. So even though I grew up in British Canada, I never had this stuff. But my understanding is plum pudding is this dish that's served at holidays and Christmas-time. So the custard is the charge, the positive charge. And these little bits of fruit are the electrons. And they're throughout. At Christmas-time, they might even put little charms in here. Like a little wishbone or something for good luck. And you pull it out and all that kind of stuff. Yeah that's merry, old England.
So this is the Plum Pudding Model. And that's what was in place. By the way, we've been using the term electron, but J. J. did not like the term electron. Actually, he won his Nobel Prize for the-- quote, unquote-- the discovery of the electron. Just as Cavendish didn't discover hydrogen, he characterized it. J. J. Thompson characterized the electron. What did he in particular characterize? He characterized the charge-to-mass ratio. He made the first quantitative measure of the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. But he never used the term, electron. He called it the corpuscle. He called it the corpuscle of electrical charge, whereas this is really sort of an elementary charge. The corpuscle