30 Facts About Ernest Rutherford

In early work, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, the radioactive element radon, and differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation.

Ernest Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei.

Ernest Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate.

Ernest Rutherford performed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction in 1917 in experiments where nitrogen nuclei were bombarded with alpha particles.

Ernest Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1919.

Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England.

Ernest Rutherford studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand, where he participated in the debating society and played rugby.

Ernest Rutherford was among the first of the 'aliens' allowed to do research at the university, under the leadership of JJ Thomson, which aroused jealousies from the more conservative members of the Cavendish fraternity.

Ernest Rutherford was to replace Hugh Longbourne Callendar who held the chair of Macdonald Professor of physics and was coming to Cambridge.

Ernest Rutherford was accepted, which meant that in 1900 he could marry Mary Georgina Newton In 1901, Ernest Rutherford gained a DSc from the University of New Zealand.

In 1925, Ernest Rutherford pushed calls to the New Zealand Government to support education and research, which led to the formation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the following year.

Ernest Rutherford was appointed to the Order of Merit in the 1925 New Year Honours and raised to the peerage as Baron Rutherford of Nelson, New Zealand and of Cambridge in the County of Cambridge in 1931, a title that became extinct upon his unexpected death in 1937.

In 1933, Rutherford was one of the two inaugural recipients of the T K Sidey Medal, set up by the Royal Society of New Zealand as an award for outstanding scientific research.

For some time before his death, Ernest Rutherford had a small hernia, which he had neglected to have fixed, and it became strangulated, causing him to be violently ill.

At Cambridge, Ernest Rutherford started to work with JJ Thomson on the conductive effects of X-rays on gases, work which led to the discovery of the electron which Thomson presented to the world in 1897.

Ernest Rutherford then discovered that thorium gave off a gas which produced an emanation which was itself radioactive and would coat other substances.

In 1903, Ernest Rutherford considered a type of radiation discovered by French chemist Paul Villard in 1900, as an emission from radium, and realised that this observation must represent something different from his own alpha and beta rays, due to its very much greater penetrating power.

Ernest Rutherford therefore gave this third type of radiation the name of gamma ray.

In 1904, Ernest Rutherford suggested that radioactivity provides a source of energy sufficient to explain the existence of the Sun for the many millions of years required for the slow biological evolution on Earth proposed by biologists such as Charles Darwin.

The physicist Lord Kelvin had argued earlier for a much younger Earth based on the insufficiency of known energy sources, but Ernest Rutherford pointed out at a lecture attended by Kelvin that radioactivity could solve this problem.

Ernest Rutherford did detect the ejected proton in 1919 and interpreted it as evidence for disintegration of the nitrogen nucleus.

Ernest Rutherford performed his most famous work after receiving the Nobel prize in 1908.

Ernest Rutherford was inspired to ask Geiger and Marsden in this experiment to look for alpha particles with very high deflection angles, of a type not expected from any theory of matter at that time.

Now, because of all these considerations, Ernest Rutherford decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a fundamental building block of all nuclei, and possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since nothing was known from the nucleus that was lighter.

Ernest Rutherford is considered to have been among the greatest scientists in history.

At the opening session of the 1938 Indian Science Congress, which Ernest Rutherford had been expected to preside over before his death, astrophysicist James Jeans spoke in his place and deemed him "one of the greatest scientists of all time", saying:.

Patrick Blackett, a research fellow working under Ernest Rutherford, using natural alpha particles, demonstrated induced nuclear transmutation.

Ernest Rutherford is known as the father of nuclear physics.

Ernest Rutherford died too early to see Leo Szilard's idea of controlled nuclear chain reactions come into being.

Ernest Rutherford realized that the energy released from the split lithium atoms was enormous, but he realized that the energy needed for the accelerator, and its essential inefficiency in splitting atoms in this fashion, made the project an impossibility as a practical source of energy.