He died in 1940 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to Sir Isaac Newton. In 1918 he became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained until his death. In 1914 he gave the Romanes Lecture in Oxford on 'The atomic theory'. He was knighted in 1908 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1912. His son became a noted physicist in his own right, winning the Nobel Prize himself for discovering the wave-like properties of electrons.įor his discovery of the electron, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1906. He fathered one son, George Paget Thomson, and one daughter, Joan Paget Thomson, with her. In 1890 he married Rose Elisabeth Paget, daughter of Sir George Edward Paget, KCB, a physician and then Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge. One of his students was Ernest Rutherford, who would later succeed him in the post. In 1884 he became Cavendish Professor of Physics. He studied engineering at Owens College, Manchester, and moved on to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Joseph John Thomson was born in 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester in England, of Scottish parentage. Thomson is credited for the discovery of the electron, of isotopes and the invention of the mass spectrometer. Sir Joseph John Thomson, OM, FRS ( 18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) often known as J. Note that he is the father of George Paget Thomson.

Related subjects: British History Post 1900 Engineers and inventors J.J.

J.j.thomson cathode ray