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c. 1864
 
    
Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell presents to the Royal Society his discoveries in the field of electromagnetics, now known collectively as Maxwell's Equations       
1878
 
    
William Crookes develops a special tube, now known as the Crookes tube, for the study of cathode rays       
1894
 
     
Scottish physicist William Ramsay isolates argon, following Rayleigh's discovery that an undiscovered gas combines with nitrogen in the air        
1895
 
    
German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovers rays that can penetrate light-proof barriers, and names them x-rays because their nature is as yet unknown       
Roentgen's X-ray of his wife's hand
Wellcome Library, London
1896
 
    
French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel discovers in uranium salt the phenomenon of natural radioactivity       
1897
 
     
English physicist Joseph John Thomson, working at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, discovers the existence of the electron        
1900
 
     
German physicist Max Planck proposes the revolutionary concept of the quantum theory        
1902
 
    
A.E. Kennelly and Oliver Heaviside independently see the link between the atmosphere and the behaviour of radio waves       
1903
 
     
Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy identify the phenomenon of radioactive half-life        
1905
 
    
Albert Einstein explains the photoelectric effect as a flow of discreet particles (quanta) of electromagnetic radiation