Niels Bohr

Bohr (1913), proposed a model of the hydrogen atom which made no intuitive sense and had a short life in the history of Physics, but, it was a ground breaking achievement for which he banked the Nobel prize in Physics in 1922. Rutherford's model of the atom that had negatively charged electrons in circular orbits about a positively charged nucleus was flawed because an accelerated charge emits electromagnetic radiation and very quickly spirals in to the nucleus. Bohr set about trying to see what conditions would have to be met if somehow sense was to be made of the riddle. He required the electron to have discreet values of angular momentum given by mvr = nh/2p at which it did not radiate. He then 'derived' Rydberg's formula. The difference in allowed orbital energies gave the photon energies of emission (or absorption). Bohr's model was weak. There was no apparent underlying reason for his conditions - they did not make sense - except that he the got the correct energy difference formula.

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