It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.

For under certain conditions the chemical atoms emit light waves of a specific length or oscillation frequency - their familiar characteristic spectra - and these can come in the form of electromagnetic waves only from accelerated electric quanta.

The emitters of the spectral series are without exception single atoms, not compounds of atoms.

It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.

An external electric field, meeting it and passing through it, affects the negative as much as the positive quanta of the atom, and pushes the former to one side, and the latter in the other direction.

At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.

Moreover, the abundance of chemical compounds and their importance in daily life hindered the chemist from investigating the question, in what does the individuality of the atoms of different elements consist.