Many years back, although no observation had ever shown anything revolving or spinning inside an atom, and although the Maxwell equations show unequivocally that a circulating charge would quickly radiate away its energy and fall into the nucleus, it was assumed that orbiting was the only way to keep electrons from falling into the nucleus. Quantum mechanics proceeded on the assumption that orbiting is right, and so there must be some reason why orbiting is possible, even if we don't know what it is.
The real reason electrons don't fall into the nucleus is that they are not electrically-charged bodies orbiting the nucleus but are electric charges that come from the nucleus, negative electric charges that have a small mass but are not actually matter. They spread out in various directions from the nucleus, forming the regular patterns that underly the crystal structure of all large-scale matter.
"the facts of organic chemistry
seem to demand that the valence electrons be grouped in certain definite
equilibrium positions about the periphery of the atom"
- - - - - Robert Millikan
Fig. 3. Negative charge clouds emanate from nucleus.
Fig. 4. Computer-generated mappings of electron distribution (in the old
system, where the electrons are most likely to be found), actually
demonstrate that the electron clouds are bi-symmetrical charge branches.
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