History of Atom Timeline

  • Democritus atom
    460 BCE

    Democritus atom

    Democritus made the first model of an atom and it looked like a plain sphere. Democritus often referred to the atom as indestructible or indivisible.
  • John Dalton

    John Dalton

    He said all elements are composed of Atoms, atoms of the same element are identical, atoms of different elements combine in simple whole numbers, and in chemical reactions, atoms are combined, separated or rearranged but never changed.
  • Dmitri Mendeleev

    Dmitri Mendeleev

    He created the first far sighted periodic table, and he the periodic law.
  • Eugen Goldstein

    Eugen Goldstein

    He is sometimes credited with the discovery of the proton. He is mainly known for the work he did with cathode rays.
  • Max Planck

    Max Planck

    He could describe the behavior of an atom at the atomic level.
  • Robert Millikan

    Robert Millikan

    He discovered the electron in an atom through the oil drop experiment.
  • Niels Bohr

    Niels Bohr

    He said that electrons move around the nucleus but only in prescribed orbits
  • Erwin Schrodinger

    Erwin Schrodinger

    He created the discovered the first way to look at the electrons of the atom through the electron cloud model.
  • Werner Heisenberg

    Werner Heisenberg

    He said that a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known at the same time.
  • J.J. Thomson's plum pudding model

    J.J. Thomson's plum pudding model

    J.J. Thompson discovered the electron in 1897 and then created the plum pudding model which demonstrated as if the electrons were inside the atom.
  • Ernest Rutherford Atom Model

    Ernest Rutherford Atom Model

    Ernest Rutherford concluded that J.J. Thomson's model was incorrect and that the electrons surrounded what would be the nucleus of the atom.
  • James Chadwick

    James Chadwick

    Found that the neutron is found in the nucleus with the proton. The neutron is the same mass as the proton.