The phenomena in these exhausted tubes reveal to physical science a new world—a world where matter exists in a fourth state.... In studying this fourth state of matter we seem at length to have within our grasp and obedient to our control the little indivisible particles which with good warrant are supposed to constitute the physical basis of the universe.[24]
Further, by 1890 Sir Arthur Schuster[25] had gone a step farther and shown how the ratio of the charge to the mass
of these same hypothetical particles might be determined. Indeed he had experimentally evaluated this ratio, obtaining, however, a value very much too small, namely,
.
But it was J. J. Thomson[26] who in 1897 first introduced a more reliable method of determining this ratio, namely, one which combines a measurement of the magnetic deflectability of a beam of cathode rays with the electrostatic deflectability of the same beam. The value which he obtained, namely,
electromagnetic units, was nearly a thousand times the value of
