Rutherford (of Nelson), Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron 1871-1937
New Zealand physicist, the 'Father of nuclear physics', and Nobel Prize winner

Ernest Rutherford was born at Brightwater, near Nelson, South Island. He was the fourth of a farmer's 12 children. He won scholarships to Nelson College and Canterbury College, Christchurch, and his first research projects were on magnetization of iron by high-frequency discharges (1894) and magnetic viscosity (1896).

In 1895 he was admitted to the Cavendish Laboratory and Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship. There he made the first successful wireless transmissions over two miles (3.2km). Under the brilliant direction of J J Thomson, Rutherford discovered the three types of uranium radiations. In 1898 he became Professor of Physics at McGill University, Canada, where, with Frederick Soddy, he formulated the theory of atomic disintegration to account for the tremendous heat energy radiated by uranium. In 1907 he became professor at Manchester and there established that alpha particles were doubly ionized helium ions by counting the number given off with a counting device, which he jointly invented with the German physicist Hans Geiger.

This led to a revolutionary conception of the atom as a miniature universe in which the mass is concentrated in the nucleus surrounded by planetary electrons. Rutherford's assistant, Niels Bohr, applied to this the quantum theory (1913), and the concept of the 'Rutherford-Bohr atom' of nuclear physics was born. During World War I, Rutherford did research on submarine detection for the Admiralty. In 1919, in a series of experiments, he discovered that alpha-ray bombardments induced atomic transformation in atmospheric nitrogen, liberating hydrogen nuclei. The same year he succeeded Thomson to the Cavendish professorship at Cambridge and reorganized the laboratory, the world centre for the study of The Newer Alchemy (1937). In 1920 he predicated the existence of the neutron, later discovered by his colleague, James Chadwick. He was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1908 and was president of the Royal Society from 1925 to 1930.

Bibliography: He wrote many memoirs on atomic structure, disintegration and the conduction of electricity and gases, and also Radioactivity (1904), Radioactive Transformations (1906) and Radioactive Substances (1930) and The Newer Alchemy (1937). See also David Wilson, Rutherford, Simple Genius (1983); M Bunge and W R Shea (eds), Rutherford and Physics at the Turn of the Century (1979); E N da C Andrade, Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom (1964).