Whose discovery was the electron?

In 1897 J. J. Thomson, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, demonstrated that cathode rays were made of tiny negatively charged particles far smaller than atoms, which we now call electrons. By measuring how the rays bent in electric and magnetic fields, he showed they had a mass thousands of times smaller than a hydrogen atom. This was the first evidence that atoms are not the smallest units of matter but contain even smaller parts. Thomson proposed an early model of the atom with electrons embedded in it. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for this work.