Along a series of lines running from longer to shorter wavelengths the effect of the electric field becomes greater as the serial numbers increase – that is, as the wavelength decreases.

The removal of an electron from the surface of an atom – that is, the ionization of the atom – means a fundamental structural change in its surface layer.

For under certain conditions the chemical atoms emit light waves of a specific length or oscillation frequency – their familiar characteristic spectra – and these can come in the form of electromagnetic waves only from accelerated electric quanta.

The most common and most important result of them is that the nature and size of the effect on corresponding series of different elements are largely an expression of the peculiarity of their atomic structure – or, at least, of the structure of the surface.

By recognizing that the chemical atom is composed of single separable electric quanta, humanity has taken a great step forward in the investigation of the natural world.

An external electric field, meeting it and passing through it, affects the negative as much as the positive quanta of the atom, and pushes the former to one side, and the latter in the other direction.

At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.

For under certain conditions the chemical atoms emit light waves of a specific length or oscillation frequency - their familiar characteristic spectra - and these can come in the form of electromagnetic waves only from accelerated electric quanta.

If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.

In my view the structure of the whole atom was that of an individual, with all its parts interconnected, and the emission of a spectral line appeared to me to be the result of the coherence and co-operation of several electric quanta.