Who , along with their team of British physicists identified the electron in 1897 ?
British natural philosopher Richard Laming first hypothesized the concept of an indivisible quantity of electric charge to explain the chemical properties of atoms in 1838 ; Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney named this charge ' electron ' in 1891 , and J. J. Thomson and his team of British physicists identified it as a particle in 1897 .