Which British laboratory did Bohr visit in 1911 to meet J. J. Thomson?

The British laboratory Bohr visited in 1911 to meet J. J. Thomson was the Cavendish Laboratory.

In September 1911, Bohr travelled from Denmark to England on a fellowship supported by the Carlsberg Foundation. The Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge was then one of the world’s leading centers for experimental physics. Its director, J. J. Thomson, had discovered the electron in 1897 and developed the influential “plum pudding” model of the atom.

Bohr met Thomson there and attended lectures by James Jeans and Joseph Larmor. The visit did not develop into a close collaboration: Bohr’s work on cathode rays failed to impress Thomson, and Bohr soon found greater scientific rapport with Ernest Rutherford and younger researchers.

That distinction matters because Bohr’s later atomic model grew primarily from Rutherford’s nuclear atom, developed at Manchester, combined with Max Planck’s quantum theory. The Cavendish Laboratory was in Cambridge, not Manchester, and it should not be confused with the Davy–Faraday Laboratory or the Clarendon Laboratory.