In connection with these experiments I chanced to observe a phenomenon which interested me very much at the time and suggested quite new possibilities. While working with these “balanced drops” I noticed on several occasions on which I had failed to screen off the rays from the radium that now and then one of them would suddenly change its charge and begin to move up or down in the field, evidently because it had captured in the one case a positive, in the other a negative, ion. This opened up the possibility of measuring with certainty, not merely the charges on individual droplets as I had been doing, but the charge carried by a single atmospheric ion.For by taking two speed measurements on the same drop, one before and one after it had caught an ion, I could obviously eliminate entirely the properties of the drop and of the medium and deal with a quantity which was proportional merely to the charge on the captured ion itself.
Accordingly, in the fall of 1909 there was started the series of experiments described in the succeeding chapter.
The problem had already been so nearly solved by the work with the water droplets that there seemed no possibility of failure. It was only necessary to get a charged droplet entirely free from evaporation into the space between the plates of a horizontal air condenser and then, by alternately throwing on and off an electrical field, to keep this droplet pacing its beat up and down between the plates until it could catch an atmospheric ion in just the way I had already seen the water droplets do. The change in the speed in the field would then be exactly proportional to the charge on the ion captured.