The popular theory of atomic structure at the time of Rutherford’s experiment was the plum pudding model. It does introduce several important features of all models used to describe the distribution of electrons in an atom. The gold foil experiment was conducted under the supervision of Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester in 1909 by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. Back in the early days of quantum mechanics, Bohr constructed a model of the hydrogen atom that worked surprisingly well considering its simplicity. (It was a running joke that any theory of atomic and molecular spectra could be destroyed by throwing a book of data at it, so complex were the spectra. Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom provides insight into the behavior of matter at the microscopic level, but it does not account for electronelectron interactions in atoms with more than one electron. This page titled 5.1: The Bohr Model is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Tom Weideman directly on the LibreTexts platform. But, in spite of years of efforts by many great minds, no one had a workable theory.

The negative sign in Equation 5.4.5 and Equation 5.4.6 indicates that energy is released as the electron moves from orbit n2 to orbit n1 because orbit n2 is at a higher energy than orbit n1. Maxwell and others had realized that there must be a connection between the spectrum of an atom and its structure, something like the resonant frequencies of musical instruments. Learn about the Bohr model of the atom, a modification of Rutherfords model that explains electrons in fixed orbits around a nucleus. 1 ( 1 n2 2 1 n2 1) Except for the negative sign, this is the same equation that Rydberg obtained experimentally.

Bohr's model of the atom