Ernest Rutherford

In 1900, Rutherford married Mary Georgina Newton, only daughter of Arthur and Mary de Renzy Newton. The couple had a daughter, Eileen Mary who married British physicist and astronomer, Ralph Fowler.

His favourite hobbies were golf and motoring.

He died after suffering from strangulated hernia on 19 October 1937, at the age of 66. He was interred at Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin.

Ernest Rutherford was born on 30 August 1871 at Spring Grove, New Zealand to James Rutherford, a Scottish emigrant farmer and Martha Thompson, an English emigrant schoolteacher. He was the fourth of a dozen children, and the second son.

He initially studied at Havelock School and at the age of 16, entered Nelson Collegiate School. Later in 1889, he won a University scholarship and joined Canterbury College, University of New Zealand, Wellington. He was a bright student and took interest in debates and rugby.

In 1893, he received a double first M.A. degree in Mathematics and Physical Science. Thereafter, he carried on his research work at the college for a brief period of time before receiving his B.Sc. degree in 1894.

In 1894, he also received an ‘1851 Research Fellowship’ from the ‘Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851’ that helped him to pursue post-graduate studies as a research scholar under J.J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

Under the supervision of J. J. Thomson at Cambridge, Ernest Rutherford invented a detector for electromagnetic waves. He managed to detect radio waves at half a mile; a ground-breaking achievement at that point of time. In 1897, he received his B.A. Research Degree and the Coutts-Trotter Studentship of Trinity College.

In 1898, he stated the presence of alpha and beta rays in uranium radiation and specified some of their characteristics. The same year, on Thomson’s reference, he was accepted for the position of Macdonald Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Two years later in 1900, he received a D.Sc degree from the University of New Zealand.

In 1907, he returned to England to become the Langworthy Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester. During World War I, he worked on a classified project of submarine detection by sonar.

In 1909, in collaboration with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, Ernest Rutherford conducted the Geiger–Marsden experiment, which established the nuclear nature of atoms by deflecting alpha particles passing through a thin gold foil.

In 1919, he succeeded Sir Joseph Thomson as the Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. He also eventually became Chairman of the Advisory Council, H.M. Government, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research; Professor of Natural Philosophy, Royal Institution, London; and Director of the Royal Society Mond Laboratory, Cambridge.

Ernest Rutherford is known as the father of nuclear physics. His own researches and work done by his associates and students under his supervision, established the nuclear structure of the atom and the characteristics of radioactive decay as a nuclear process.

While at Cambridge, he worked with J. J. Thomson on the conductive effects of X-rays on gases. This led to the discovery of the electron which Thomson presented to the world in 1897.

While exploring uranium’s radioactivity, he discovered two distinct types of radiations that differed from X-rays in their penetrating power. He named themAlpha ray and Beta ray in 1899.

In 1903, he considered a type of radiation discovered previously by a French chemist, Paul Villard. It had a much greater penetration power and he named it the Gamma ray. All three names of the radiations – Alpha, Beta, and Gamma are still in common use to this day.

In 1919, he became the first person to transform one element into another. This was achieved through an experimentation wherein alpha radiation was used to convert nitrogen into oxygen. As a result of the reaction, proton was discovered in 1920.