How did Hermann von Helmholtz connect Faraday’s laws of electrolysis with the idea that electricity consists of particles?

Hermann von Helmholtz connected Michael Faraday’s laws of electrolysis to the particulate nature of electricity by applying the logic of atomic theory to electrochemical data.1

While many scientists of his time accepted the existence of chemical atoms, Helmholtz argued in an 1881 lecture that if these atoms were real, then Faraday’s laws—which dictate that the amount of substance deposited at an electrode is proportional to the quantity of electricity passed—necessarily implied that electricity itself must exist in discrete, fundamental units.1

By relating the amount of current to the equivalent weights of elements, Helmholtz reasoned that electricity could not be a continuous fluid, but rather a collection of particles. This hypothetical unit of charge was soon identified as the electron. This insight was significant because it moved beyond Faraday’s own view, which had characterized electrical action as a series of tensions and wave-like patterns in a medium rather than the flow of material particles.123