Short answers, pulled from the story.
Joseph John Thomson was born on the 18th of December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. He grew up in a working-class district where his father ran an antiquarian bookshop and his mother came from a local textile family.
On the 30th of April 1897, J. J. Thomson proposed that the atom contains a fundamental unit more than 1,000 times smaller than the atom itself, which is now known as the electron. He concluded that cathode rays were composed of very light, negatively charged particles that were a universal building block of atoms.
In 1912, J. J. Thomson and his research assistant F. W. Aston channelled a stream of neon ions through magnetic and electric fields to observe two patches of light on a photographic plate. This observation led them to conclude that neon is composed of atoms with two different atomic masses, neon-20 and neon-22, providing the first evidence for isotopes of a stable element.
J. J. Thomson died on the 30th of August 1940 and his ashes rest in Westminster Abbey near the graves of Isaac Newton and Ernest Rutherford. He served as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death after being appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics on the 22nd of December 1884.
Seven of J. J. Thomson's students went on to win Nobel Prizes, including Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson, and Edward Appleton. His own son, George Paget Thomson, shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics with Clinton Davisson for their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals.