43 Facts About Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson was a New Zealand physicist who was a pioneering researcher in both atomic and nuclear physics.

Ernest Rutherford has been described as "the father of nuclear physics", and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday".

Together with Thomas Royds, Ernest Rutherford is credited with proving that alpha radiation is composed of helium nuclei.

Ernest Rutherford arrived at this theory through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering during the gold foil experiment performed by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden.

Ernest Rutherford is credited with developing the atomic numbering system alongside Henry Moseley.

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

In honour of his scientific advancements, Ernest Rutherford was recognised as a baron of the United Kingdom.

Ernest Rutherford was the fourth of twelve children of James Rutherford, an immigrant farmer and mechanic from Perth, Scotland, and his wife Martha Thompson, a schoolteacher from Hornchurch, England.

When Ernest Rutherford was five he moved to Foxhill, New Zealand, and attended Foxhill School.

At age 11 in 1883, the Ernest Rutherford family moved to Havelock, a town in the Marlborough Sounds.

Ernest Rutherford studied at Nelson College between 1887 and 1889, and was head boy in 1889.

Ernest Rutherford was offered a cadetship in government service, but he declined as he still had 15 months of college remaining.

Ernest Rutherford participated in its debating society and the Science Society.

Thereafter, he invented a new form of radio receiver, and in 1895 Ernest Rutherford was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, to travel to England for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

When Ernest Rutherford began his studies at Cambridge, he was among the first 'aliens' allowed to do research at the university, and was additionally honoured to study under JJ Thomson.

Again under Thomson's leadership, Ernest Rutherford worked on the conductive effects of X-rays on gases, which led to the discovery of the electron, the results first presented by Thomson in 1897.

In 1898, Ernest Rutherford was accepted to the chair of Macdonald Professor of physics position at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, on Thomson's recommendation.

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 was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".

Ernest Rutherford continued to make ground-breaking discoveries long 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, which was not expected according to any theory of matter at that time.

In 1912, Ernest Rutherford was joined by Niels Bohr.

The claim that Ernest Rutherford developed sonar is a misconception, as subaquatic detection technologies utilise Langevin's transducer.

Ernest Rutherford returned to the Cavendish Laboratory in 1919, succeeding JJ Thomson as the Cavendish professor and the laboratory's director, posts that he held until his death in 1937.

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 to be lighter than that nucleus.

Ernest Rutherford received significant recognition in his home country of New Zealand.

In 1925, Ernest Rutherford called for 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.

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

Additionally, Ernest Rutherford received a number of awards from the British Crown.

Ernest Rutherford was appointed to the Order of Merit in the 1925 New Year Honours.

Around 1888 Ernest Rutherford made his grandmother a wooden potato masher which is in the collection of the Royal Society.

In 1900, at St Paul's Anglican Church, Papanui in Christchurch, Ernest Rutherford married Mary Georgina Newton, to whom he had been engaged before leaving New Zealand.

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

Ernest Rutherford had an emergency operation in London, but died in Cambridge four days later, on 19 October 1937, at age 66, of what physicians termed "intestinal paralysis".

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:.

Ernest Rutherford is known as "the father of nuclear physics" because his research, and work done under him as laboratory director, established the nuclear structure of the atom and the essential nature of radioactive decay as a nuclear process.

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

Later, Ernest Rutherford's team, using protons from an accelerator, demonstrated artificially-induced nuclear reactions and transmutation.

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

Ernest Rutherford realised that the energy released from the split lithium atoms was enormous, but he realised 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.