The Electronic Theories of the Properties of Metals

Abstract

IN a course of lectures delivered at the Cavendish Laboratory during the Michaelmas term of 1886, Sir J. J. Thomson examined the dynamical result of assuming the passage of electricity through a metal to be of the same nature as through an electrolyte. The subject was dealt with more completely in “Applications of Dynamics to Physics and Chemistry” in 1888. The later discovery of the electron which might act as a carrier of electricity from molecule to molecule placed the idea on a much firmer footing, and in 1898 Riecke developed theories of the electrical and thermal conduction and thermo-electrical properties of metals, based on the existence be˜-tween the molecules of carriers of positive and negative electricity. Two years later Drude worked out more systematically theories founded on the same basis, and it is his work which is usually quoted in accounts of electronic theories, generally with the simplification that only one type of carrier-the negative electron-is taken as moving freely between the molecules. These electrons are supposed to be produced by the dissociation of the electrically neutral metal atoms, what remains of the atom being left positively charged.