In 1909 Ferdinand Braun and Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) were awarded the Nobel Prize "For their development of wireless telegraphy".
With a tube filled with highly rarefied gas, similar to the one presented here, in 1896 J. J. Thomson confirmed definitively the corpuscular nature of cathodic rays by determining the ratio between the charge and the mass of the constituent particle: the electron.
Initially, he believed that the particles of the cathodic rays were atoms or molecules, but the size of the deflections in the magnetic field indicated that it had to be a much lighter particle.
Having at his disposal a tube with a very high vacuum, he succeeded in obtaining a good deflection with an electric field perpendicular to the direction of the rays and compensated for that deflection with one produced by a magnetic field, directed perpendicularly to the direction of the rays and to the electric field; he thus found for the ratio between the charge and the mass of the supposed particle a value that was 1700 times the ratio between charge and mass of the hydrogen ion obtained by electrolysis. Therefore, if in the two cases the charge was the same, the mass of the particle of the cathodic rays had to be 1700 times smaller than that of the hydrogen ion, which was the lightest particle known at that time. ...continues