The simple machine that visualised atomic orbitals
By 
Philip Ball2025-09-18T08:29:00
In 1931, Harvey Elliott White developed a device that traced out the shapes of electron clouds by approximating solutions to the Schrödinger equation
The invention of quantum mechanics – a mathematical method for calculating quantum states of atoms – 100 years ago by Werner Heisenberg was followed soon after by Erwin Schrödinger’s rival scheme, commonly known as wave mechanics. While Heisenberg tabulated the frequencies of spectral transitions in matrices, Schrödinger – who published his famous equation in early 1926 – represented the behaviour of quantum particles such as electrons in a form that looked reassuringly like a conventional equation of motion.