Who discovered the Atom?

Who discovered the Atom?

The word of Atom comes to us from a Greek word which means Indivisible. The Greek believed all matter consisted of tiny particles which could not be divided further and called the last bit an atom.

In 1803, John Dalton, an English chemist and mathematician was the first man to develop a scientific atomic theory. He was a careful experimenter and weighted equal volumes of many gases and discovered differences in their weights. He observed that gases, as well as liquids and solids, were made up of unbelievably tiny particles which he, too, called atoms. He determined relative weights for the atoms of elements familiar to him. Dalton really started the scientific knowledge of the atom by stating that atoms of different elements have different properties and different weight.

Almost a hundred years later, another Englishman Ernest Rutherford developed atomic theory resembling description of a solar system. Accounting to this theory, an atom is composed of a heavy nucleus in the center, with a positive charge of electricity and negatively charged electrons surrounding it.