The discovery of the electron was made known to the world in 1897 by a physicist from Britain named J.J. Thomson. He used cathode ray tubes to prove that these rays are made up of very small, negatively charged particles that had not been seen before. He initially named these particles “corpuscles” and found that they are more than 1,000 times lighter than a hydrogen atom. The discovery by Thomson earned him a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906.