A flax miller's son from New Zealand found the atomic nucleus
Ernest Rutherford, fourth of twelve children on New Zealand farmland, became the father of nuclear physics. He showed that an atom's charge sits in a tiny core, performed the first artificial nuclear reaction and named the proton. Oddly, his Nobel Prize came in chemistry, not physics.
Brightwater, on New Zealand's South Island, was his birthplace on 30 August 1871; the birth certificate misspelled him as Earnest, and his family called him Ern. His father, a Scottish immigrant, ran a flax mill, and his mother was a schoolteacher from England. Scholarships carried him from Nelson College, where he was head boy, to Canterbury College. After inventing a new kind of radio receiver he won a fellowship in 1895 to research at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory under J. J. Thomson, among the first outsiders without a Cambridge degree allowed to do so.
His early radio work briefly held the record for detecting electromagnetic waves at a distance, half a mile. He then turned to radioactivity. He introduced the idea of half-life, discovered radon, and separated and named alpha and beta radiation; with Thomas Royds he proved alpha particles are helium nuclei. At McGill University in Montreal from 1898 he worked with the young chemist Frederick Soddy. In 1908 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studying how elements disintegrate.
The famous discovery came when Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden fired particles at thin gold foil in his lab. Interpreting how particles scattered, Rutherford proposed in 1911 that atoms carry their charge in a very small nucleus. In 1912 he brought Niels Bohr into his lab, which led to the Bohr model. In 1917, firing alpha particles into nitrogen, he triggered the first artificially induced nuclear reaction and detected a particle he later renamed the proton.
From 1919 he directed the Cavendish, where James Chadwick found the neutron and Cockcroft and Walton split the nucleus under his direction, both in 1932. Made a baron, he died in 1937 and was buried in Westminster Abbey near Newton and Darwin. Element 104, rutherfordium, was named for him in 1997, and since 1999 his face has appeared on New Zealand's hundred-dollar note.
Source: Ernest Rutherford
