The name ‘electron’ was introduced by George Stoney in 1891 to denote an elementary quantity of electricity. Before electron was discovered by J.J. Thomson in 1897, many ideas and terminologies had been introduced in Chemistry. Hence, it is inevitable to find many inconsistent and unintelligible descriptions in modern Chemistry textbooks.
What are the consequences for students nowadays? Well, one has to swallow many strange and misleading terms in Chemistry. For example, cation means positive ion, while cathode means negative electrode. If Faraday first called a postive ion as "cation", he apparently knew that it would spontaneously move to the cathode.
It is very likely that he might have considered the cathode as the home for cations, just as how gravity was explained by an Aristotlean before Galileo.
As many students would gradually realise, chemistry has become part of modern physics since the discovery of electron. Without using electron and its properties, namely its electric charge and intrinsic spin, Chemistry would be still in its dark age.
Studens may find it difficult to distinguish potential of electric field and the potential energy of a charged particle, such as electron, in the field, partly because they don't know how to apply calculus properly, but mainly because they would be trapped in old terminologies, such as electrophobe and electrophile, in relation to love and hatred.
Unlike others, I teach Chemistry based on Physics. To be specific, electrostatics, work-energy theorem, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanis. If you are struggling with such concepts as Gibbs free energy, entropy, electrolysis and spectroscopy, then contact me.
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