Did Richardson discover the electron?
No, that is a common misconception. I did not discover the electron; that honor belongs to J.J. Thomson, my mentor at Cambridge, who identified the electron as a fundamental particle in 1897. My own contributions focused on understanding the behavior of electrons when emitted from hot surfaces, a phenomenon known as thermionic emission. The experimental evidence suggests that my work built directly upon Thomson's discovery, as I used cathode ray tubes and vacuum techniques to study how electrons leave a heated metal. I extended this to formulate Richardson's law, which quantifies the emission process. It is evident that the electron itself was already known, but my research elucidated its interaction with matter at high temperatures. Some might confuse my name with the discovery because of my Nobel Prize, but I always credited Thomson's foundational work. My book, *The Emission of Electricity from Hot Bodies*, makes this distinction clear.
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