Internet Archive (archive.org), 2026-10-08

Investigator (STEP I), project Thompson-JJ. Searched by script with the advancedsearch API (title + creator/description "thomson"), then full text (_djvu.txt) fetched to research/pages/ and grepped.

Queries (title:"..."): structure of light; beyond the electron; recollections and reflections; electron in chemistry; recent researches in electricity; notes on recent researches; applications of dynamics; rays of positive electricity; matter and the aether; life of sir j. j. thomson. Also creator:(Thomson, J. J.) (110 hits, mostly other Thomsons).

Thomson's own works available (priority 1)

1921 second edition of Rays of Positive Electricity (most important find here)

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.160862 - Preface to the second edition (Trinity Lodge, August 1921): new matter on molecular structure and chemical combination; says the first edition's hope was "fulfilled to a remarkable extent by the researches of Mr. Aston and others on the determination of atomic weights and the detection of isotopes"; delay due to the War. [web, rays1921.txt l.102-139] - Helium from bombarded salts (pp.194-196 of the 2nd ed.): the same two explanations as 1913 are kept side by side: (a) an "accidental accompaniment", e.g. a layer of condensed air on the salt surface, consistent with the yield falling off; (b) a process "analogous to that which causes the expulsion of an a particle" in radioactive atoms, the helium being loosened and then detached by cathode-ray bombardment. He adds that the view that helium can be got from many elements is so fundamental that "few will be prepared to accept it unless every other explanation has been shown to be untenable"; he looked for the residues (Li minus He = 3; Na minus He = 19, fluorine; Be minus He = 5) without decisive results. [web, rays1921.txt l.9125-9213] - Bears on claim 5: Thomson did not withdraw the disintegration reading by 1921; he kept it as an open alternative, with a stated test (find the residue atom). - X3 chapter retained: "On the nature of X3, the substance giving the '3' line" (p.196 ff.). [web] - Isotopes chapter (pp.~212-221): neon "and its isotope" indexed at p.212; on chlorine he writes that he had attributed the lines near 37 to hydrides, not isotopes, and that direct evidence that 37 is an isotope of the 35 constituent "is very desirable", while accepting Aston's result that one constituent has atomic weight 35. [web, l.10205-10230] - Bears on claim 5 (the 22 line): shows how cautiously Thomson treated the isotope reading in 1921, after Aston's work.

Beyond the Electron (1928) (own work, priority 1)

• Thomson keeps the Faraday-Maxwell field view: if properties of charges are due to lines of force "into the surrounding ether, we must place the energy of the electron in the space outside the little sphere"; credits Poynting for energy travelling through the ether outside a wire. [web, l.355-400]
• He proposes a dual structure of the electron: one part, where the energy is, built of lines of electric force; the other "a train of waves in resonance with the electron and which determine the path along which it travels". He links it to his own light model (Phil. Mag. Oct 1924): light as "a closed ring of electric force" carrying the energy plus guiding waves that carry none; frequency proportional to the ring's energy, "in accordance with Planck's law". [web, l.745-775]
• Bears on claim 2 (field energy and "bound ether") and claim 3 (pulses along Faraday tubes); and on claim 6 (ring structures). Related in idea to de Broglie's 1924-27 pilot-wave proposal (a [memory, high] comparison, not Thomson's words).

Rayleigh, Life of Sir J. J. Thomson (1942) (historical record, priority 4)

• On Electricity and Matter: Thomson pictured light emitted along "discrete Faraday tubes" with "real physical individuality, like stretched strings", and X-rays as a sharp kink along the tube of a stopped corpuscle; Rayleigh says such conceptions "are not now in date" because of the difficulties that compelled quantum theory. [web, l.6558-6580]
• Rayleigh notes Thomson's argument that the Faraday-tube theory explains why X-rays ionise fewer than one molecule in a thousand million: a wave front that is "not uniform, but has specks of great intensity". [web, l.6581-6600] Bears on claim 3; this is Thomson's pre-photon argument for localized radiation.
• Thomson's interest in psychical research; chapter in Recollections, conclusions "for the most part negative" but he "does not sum up definitely against the phenomena". [web, l.1424-1428] Peripheral.
• Contents list a chapter "Positive Rays" (pp.166-175) with "Dr Aston's recollections" [web, l.165-170]: not read; likely to hold Aston's account of the neon-22 work (claim 5). Read next run.