Lesson 2

Atomic Theory and Atomic Structure

Objectives:
The learners shall be able to:
1. describe the ideas of the Ancient Greeks on the atom
2. describe the ideas of the Ancient Greeks on the elements
3. describe the contributions of the alchemists to the science of chemistry
4. point out the main ideas in the discovery of the structure of the atom and its subatomic
particles
5. cite the contributions of J.J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, Henry Moseley, and Niels Bohr
to the understanding of the structure of the atom
6. describe the nuclear model of the atom and the location of its major components (protons,
neutrons, and electrons)
7. explain how the concept of atomic number led to the synthesis of new elements in the
laboratory
8. cite the contribution of John Dalton toward the understanding of the concept of chemical
elements.
9. Explain how Dalton’s Theory contributed to the discovery of other elements.

The Atomic Theory According to the Ancient Greeks

According to the fundamental Greek theory of matter originated by the philosopher

Empedocles, there were only four elements: fire, air, water, and earth – that make up matter.
Empedocles asserted that the properties of materials are imparted by the different proportions of
the “four elements” that comprise them. For example, the hardness and dryness of a stone are
attributed to its high composition of the element “earth”. The softness and the life of animals come
from their high water and fire compositions. Aristotle supported this idea and added a fifth element,
which he called aether or ether. His ideas greatly influenced the alchemist from 300 B.C. until the
end of the 17th century.
 Figure 1: Empedocles's four-element theory

Aristotle defined the four elements by using a combination of an arbitrary set of dichotomies
that he thought were the fundamental properties of material reality: hotness, coldness, wetness,
and dryness. In Aristotle’s system, fire was defined as a “hot and dry” element, the earth was the
basic “cold and dry” element, water was the “wet and cold” element, and air was the “hot and wet”
element.

The alchemist intertwined chemical questions with mythical and spiritual concepts to
transmute metal into gold, discover a universal cure for diseases, and discover a means of prolonging
life. However, none of these aims succeeded. Nevertheless, alchemy still contributed numerous
techniques and concepts to chemistry such as the systematic logical approaches, the knowledge of
medicinal chemistry, and the development of industrial chemistry.

Contribution of Alchemy to the Development of Modern Chemistry

As philosophers such as Democritus and Aristotle debated and speculated on what they think is
the ultimate nature of material reality, the rest of the ancient world made use of substances and
invented technologies that involved the application and measurement of substances, even when
Chemistry was not yet systematized and organized as a formal corpus and branch of knowledge then.
Food preservation, embalming, fermentation, and metallurgy were among some of the earliest
applications of the concepts that today are considered part of chemistry textbooks and are merely
taken for granted.
 Chemistry traces its historical roots to an arcane field called alchemy, which is today
considered pseudoscience. Broadly defined, alchemy refers to a set of traditions, practices, and
speculations that seek and purports to transform ordinary metals into more precious ones, as well as
cure diseases, reverse aging and achieve immortality.

Although alchemy is largely discredited today, some of its practitioners eventually laid the
foundations of modern chemistry. For instance, an alchemist from Greece experimented with
chemical processes. Along the way, they invented and refined techniques of distillation and
sublimation. They also undertook crude experiments involving base metal, organic material, and
sulfuric acid to produce colorful solutions that look magical and strange to onlookers.

The Birth of Modern Chemistry

As early as 400 B.C., some Greek philosophers, including Democritus, supported the idea of
matter based on particle theory. They believed that all matter is composed of very small particles
called “atoms”, a term that came from the Greek word atomos, which means “indivisible” or
“uncuttable”. Aristotle, however, did not believe in the existence of atoms. He asserted that all
matter was continuous, an idea which is accepted for almost 2000 years. But both theories were not
supported by experimental studies and therefore remained as speculations until 1800.

During the Age of Enlightenment, which spanned the 16th to 18th centuries, key developments
across various fields of science took place that eventually led to the establishment of modern Physics
and Chemistry that we know today. The latter descended from the branches of alchemy that began
to distinguish and distance themselves from superstition, fantasy, and fraud around this time.

Aristotle’s four-element theory and the practice of alchemy came to an end when “The
Sceptical Chymist” by Robert Boyle was published in 1661. It was when then those scientists came
up with experimental results that lead to what we now know as the “atomic theory of matter”. Boyle
introduced a system of quantitative measurements and comparisons in experiments that aims to
study the behavior of gases. He was also the first to define “element” as anything that cannot be
broken down into two or several simpler substances. His more general definition of an element was
more consistent with observations and led to the discovery of more elements.

Almost a century after Boyle’s innovations, a French scientist named Antoine Lavoisier
conducted a series of quantitative experiments that led to the formulation of the basic laws that
govern the behavior of matter. Among these natural laws that he discovered and verified was the
Law of Conservation of Mass. Because of his immense contributions that helped usher the field, he
was considered the “father of modern chemistry”.

A Timeline on the Brief History of Matter and Atoms

Year Event
Empedocles asserted that all things are composed of four primal
450 B.C.
elements: earth, air, water, and fire.
Democritus proposed that all matter is made up of very small particles
400 B.C.
called atoms, which cannot be divided into smaller units.
Aristotle proposed that all matter was continuous and can be divided
380 – 320 B.C.
into smaller pieces.
1799 Joseph Proust proposed the law of definite proportions
John Joseph Dalton formulated the atomic theory and proposed the law
1808
of multiple proportions.
Dmitry Mendeleev arranged the known elements in a periodic table
1869
based on their atomic mass.
Antoine Becquerel and Marie Curie observed that radioactivity causes
1890s
some atoms to break down spontaneously.
1895 Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays.
1897 John Joseph Thomson discovered electrons.
John Joseph Thomson suggested the plum pudding model of the atom
1904
(negative electrons dispersed in a positive structure).
Robert Millikan found that the charge of an electron is equal to -1.6022
1908 – 1917
x 10-19 C
1910 - 1911 Ernest Rutherford observed that atoms are mostly empty space.
Niels Bohr proposed an atomic model that shows electrons move in
concentric orbits around the nucleus.
1913
Henry Gwyn Jeffrey’s Moseley and X-ray spectra to study atomic
structure
1919 Ernest Rutherford discovered protons.
1932 James Chadwick discovered neutrons.
The Development of John Dalton’s Model of the Atom

When you burn paper, it seems to “disappear” into “nothing”. Paper, in turn, is produced from
nothingness. Such was the prevailing idea on the nature and process of burning in the 18th century.
In one of his famous experiments, Lavoisier weighed an amount of mercury which he then placed in
a sealed container, whose weight is also known. He heated them until the mercury evaporated into
a visible gas. If the mercury indeed transformed into “nothing”, the total weight of the sealed jar
and mercury should be less than their combined initial weight before they were heated.

Instead, Lavoisier discovered that the sealed jar was heated, and its total weight remained
the same as its initial total weight. This led him to conclude that matter can neither be created nor
destroyed, otherwise known as the Law of Conservation of Mass. The mercury merely transformed
into something else invisible, and this invisible substance has the same mass as before it was heated.

Another French chemist, Joseph Proust, built on Lavoisier's discovery of the law of
conservation of mass by conducting a different set of quantitative experiments that sought to
determine how new compounds form from an initial set of materials. This led Proust to formulate
the Law of Definite Proportions, which states that all compounds are made up of fixed proportions
(or ratios) of elements.

By the early 19th Century, there was already technology available to determine what ultimately
makes up all matter, unlike Democritus’ time. The basic laws of conservation of mass and definite
proportions were already known. One of these people who took advantage of these developments
was the British school teacher named John Dalton.

Although Boyle’s definition of what makes an element an “element” was already widely
accepted, it was still unknown what elements are. Dalton hypothesized that Proust’s Law of Definite
Proportions works, elements must appear and behave like tiny particles when they combined to form
a given compound. Consequently, a given compound would always have the same combination of
these atoms. To test his hypothesis, Dalton set himself to work and proved that elements tend to
exist in ratios of small whole numbers in compounds. This became what is known as the Law of
Multiple Proportions.

Dalton’s Atomic Theory

In 1808, John Joseph Dalton came up with a theory that marked the beginning of the modern
era of chemistry. His postulate may be summed up by what is known as Dalton’s atomic theory.
 1. Elements are made up of small indivisible particles called atoms.
2. In any given pure element, the mass and other properties of all the atoms are the same.
Atoms of different elements differ in mass and other properties.
3. Compounds are composed of atoms of more than one element. The constituent atoms in a
given compound are present in a consistent or constant whole-number ratio.
4. In a chemical reaction, atoms are neither created nor destroyed. They combine, separate,
or rearrange.

Dalton’s concepts about matter and atoms are more detailed than those of Democritus. Though
he did not focus on describing the structure of an atom, he realized the differing properties of
elements, taking hydrogen and oxygen as examples. According to Dalton, the atoms of hydrogen are
different from those of oxygen.

The third postulate of Dalton supports the finding of Joseph Proust about the composition of
matter. In 1799, Proust proposed an important principle that revealed a quantitative analysis of
chemical reactions, the Law of Definite Proportion. By consolidating the findings of Proust and
Lavoisier as part of the postulates of his atomic theory, Dalton was able to explain how the chemical
reaction in our everyday lives takes place.

Dalton’s atomic theory finally demolished the veracity of transmutation, which was a
cornerstone process of alchemy. Although atoms are by now known to exist as particles, Dalton and
his successors only assumed that they looked like and behaved like “billiard balls”. The structure of
the atom would not be discovered until almost a hundred years after Boyle published his atomic
theory.

Structure of an Atom

Today an atom is defined as the tiniest particles of an element that retains the chemical
properties of that element. All atoms are made up of the nucleus and the electrons. At the center of
an atom is the nucleus, which is composed of protons and neutrons. These two units are collectively
called nucleons. The nucleus is orbited by the atom’s electrons.

Establishing the structure of an atom took a long time and the concerted efforts of many
scientists. After the postulation of Dalton’s atomic theory, experiments, and scientific inferences
allowed scientists to conceptualize the structure of the atom and the properties of its component
particles.
 After the discovery of X-rays in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen, Antoine Becquerel started studying
the fluorescent properties of some substances. He accidentally learned that the darkening of thickly
wrapped photographic plates occurs after exposing them to a uranium compound. One of his
students, Marie Curie, proposed the term radioactivity to describe the ability of a material to
undergo spontaneous emission of particles or radiation. Later on, it was found that three types of
rays are produced by the radioactive decay of a material: alpha, beta, and gamma rays. The alpha
rays consist of positively charged particles called alpha particles and therefore deflected by a
positively charged plate. Beta rays consist of beta particles (high-energy electrons) and are deflected
by a negatively charged plate. The gamma-ray has high energy. Similar to X-rays, gamma rays have
no charge and are not affected by an external electric or magnetic field.

Figure 2: Three types of rays emitted by radioactive materials

In 1897, John Joseph Thomson presented that electrons have a negative charge. He proposed
the “plum pudding” model of an atom, which illustrated how the negative charge electrons (plums)
are mixed with smeared-out positive charges (pudding). This model explained the neutrality of an
atom. However, it was short-lived and was immediately disproved as more information regarding the
atom and its nature and composition was unearthed.
 Figure 3: Thomson's “plum pudding” model of an atom

The result of Ernest Rutherford’s gold foil experiment in 1911 showed another view of the
structure of the atom. Rutherford used a gold foil in measuring the scattering of alpha particles. He
noticed that most of the alpha particles passed through the foil with little or no deflection; a few
deflected at wide angles. The lesser number of deflected alpha particles suggested that relatively
small positively charged particles in the gold foil repelled the positive alpha particles. Moreover,
Rutherford concluded that most of the atom is empty, which allowed most of the alpha particles to
pass through the foil. In summary, the gold foil experiment established that the nucleus is very dense,
very small, and positively charged. Rutherford also concluded that the electrons are located outside
the nucleus

Figure 4: Rutherford’s experimental design for measuring alpha particles using gold foil
Protons and Neutrons

The positively charged particle in the nucleus is called the proton. Experiments revealed that
the magnitude of the charge of a proton is the same as that of an electron but opposite in sign,
which is +1.6022 x 10-19 coulombs (C). Each proton weighs as much as 1.67262 x 10-24 grams.

Rutherford and other scientists thought that there must be another type of subatomic particle
in the nucleus. In 1932, James Chadwick proved the presence of neutral subatomic particles, which
he named neutrons. In his experiment, Chadwick bombarded a thin sheet of beryllium with alpha
particles that led to the emission of very high-energy radiation that did not deflect upon passing
through a magnetic field and that is electrically neutral. In his later experiments, which are similar
to those of Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie, Chadwick found out that the radiation can knock off
protons of hydrogen atoms from a paraffin target and recoil the protons with great velocity. From
his results, Chadwick then concluded that the radiation consisted of neutral particles that are slightly
heavier than the protons and that these particles are found in the nucleus, together with the protons.

Figure 5: Rutherford’s Nuclear (left); Model and Bohr’s Planetary Model (right)

Electrons

Surrounding the nucleus are negatively charged particles called electrons. In a series of
experiments conducted by Robert Millikan in the early 1900s, he found out that an electron has a
charge equal to -1.6022 x 10-19 coulombs (C). From this result, the mass of an electron was calculated
to be 9.10 x 10-28 grams. Compared to the mass of a proton, each electron is considered 1840 times
lighter than a proton. Unlike the nucleus, electrons are considered elementary particles, which
means that they cannot be broken down into smaller subunits.

The equal number of protons and electrons makes an atom electrically neutral. This stability
was proven by Niels Bohr in 1913 using a new model in which electrons stay in particular orbits where
they do not lose or gain energy. This model served as the beginning of quantum mechanics.
Atomic Number and Atomic Mass

The discovery of subatomic particles prompted other scientists to study the variations in the
characteristics of elements. English physicist Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley experimentally found that
different metals bombarded with electrons produced varying frequencies of X-rays. He attributed
these results to the difference in the positive charge in the nucleus of the elements. He correlated
the frequencies to whole numbers, which he assigned to each element, the atomic number.

The number serves as the identity of an atom. Given the symbol Z, the atomic number refers
to the number of protons in the nucleus of each atom of an element. In a neutral atom, the number
of protons is equal to the number of electrons. Therefore, the atomic number also indicates the
number of electrons in a neutral atom. For example, the atomic number of carbon is 6. This means
that each neutral atom has 6 protons and 6 electrons.

The atomic mass, given the symbol A, is the total number of neutrons and protons present in
the nucleus of an atom of an element. All atomic nuclei contain both protons and neutrons. An
exception to this is hydrogen, which has one proton but no neutron.

Atomic mass = number of protons + number of neutrons

= atomic number + number of neutrons

The most acceptable way to represent the atomic number (Z) and atomic mass (A) of an
atom of hypothetical X is shown below:

When Dmitry Mendeleev arrange the element according to their atomic masses in 869, he
paved the way for the construction of the present periodic table. However, Moseley argued and
confirmed in 1913 that the basis for the arrangement in the periodic table should be the atomic
number. Until today, the periodic table is still arranged in terms of atomic number. Before the
discovery of some elements, the periodic table had gaps, which led scientists to think that there
were still undiscovered elements that should fill in these gaps. Through time, many elements were,
discovered, while some were and still are being synthesized in the laboratory.
Isotopes

In most cases, the atoms of a given elements do not have the same mass. Atoms that have the
same atomic number but different atomic masses are called isotopes. As an example, hydrogen has
protium, deuterium, and tritium as its isotopes. Recall these isotopes were the first forms of matter
after the big bang.

Figure 6: Isotopes of hydrogen

Isotopes follow the same representation as elements such as those given in Figure 6. They may
also be written using element names or symbols, followed by a dash and the atomic mass. For
example, protium may also be written as hydrogen-1 or H-1.

Ions

You now know that isotopes form through nuclear reactions. From the term itself, nuclear
reactions mainly involve the nucleus of a particle, which consists of the proton and the neutrons.
There are reactions, however, that involve only the electrons that are found outside the nucleus.
These reactions are referred to as chemical reactions.

During a chemical reaction, the number of protons remains the same in the atomic nucleus,
but the electrons may be lost by one atom and gained by another. The loss or gain of one or more
electrons leads to the formation of an atom with a net positive or negative charge, respectively.
These charged atoms are generally called ions. A positively charged ion is called a cation; a
negatively charged ion is called an anion.
 The charge (q) of an ion is written as a superscript on the right-hand side of the chemical
symbol. A (+1) or a (-1) charge is normally written as just (+) or (-), respectively.

𝐴 𝑞
𝑍𝑋
The charge of an ion may be computed using the formula

q = number of protons – number of electrons

Number Number Number

Substance Symbol Z A of of of
Protons Electrons Neutrons
39
Neutral 19𝐾 19 39 19 19 20
Potassium
39 +
Cation 19𝐾 19 39 19 18 20
24
Magnesium Neutral 12𝑀𝑔 12 24 12 12 12
24 2+
Cation 12𝑀𝑔 12 24 12 10 12
35
Chlorine Neutral 17𝐶𝑙 17 35 17 17 18
35 −
Anion 17𝐶𝑙 17 35 17 18 18
14
Nitrogen Neutral 7𝑁 7 14 7 7 7
14 3−
Anion 7𝑁 7 14 7 10 7