Ernest Rutherford (1871 - 1937)

Ernest Rutherford

Biography

Ernest Rutherford

 

E rnest Rutherford was born near Nelson in 1871. ‘Ern’, as he was known by his family, later claimed his inventiveness was honed on the challenges of helping out on his parents' farm: ‘We haven't the money, so we've got to think’.

 

His mother, who believed ‘all knowledge is power’, made sure her children had a good education.

 

 

After gaining three degrees at Canterbury College, Rutherford won an Exhibition of 1851 scholarship and used it to study at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Nicknamed ‘crocodile’ (because crocodiles always look forwards), he became known for his ability to make imaginative leaps and design experiments to test them.

 

In 1898 he accepted a professorship at McGill University in Montreal, returning to New Zealand briefly to marry Mary Newton, the daughter of his former landlady. It was at McGill University that Rutherford made the first of three major breakthroughs of his career: the discovery that atoms of heavy elements have a tendency to decay. This heralded the ‘carbon dating’ technique still important in science today.

 

Rutherford returned to England in 1907 to become Professor of Physics at Manchester University. Here he produced his second breakthrough – a new model of the atom as a tiny nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons.

 

During the First World War, Rutherford worked on acoustic methods of detecting submarines – and unsuccessfully tried to persuade the United States government to use young scientists for research rather than in the trenches. It was not his first cause. He had campaigned for women to share men's privileges at Cambridge University, and spoken up for the freedom of the British Broadcasting Corporation from government censorship.

 

In 1917 Rutherford claimed that he had 'broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter’. In his third major breakthrough, he had succeeded in 'splitting' the atom – making him the world's first successful alchemist. This research was published in 1919, the same year he became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory. There he proved a humane and supportive leader who never failed to let his students take credit for research he had mentored.

 

On his final trip to New Zealand in 1925, Rutherford was received as a national hero and gave talks to packed halls around the country. His call for government to support education and research helped drive the establishment of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) the following year.

 

In 1908 Rutherford received a Nobel Prize for his work on the disintegration of elements. He was knighted in 1914, decorated with the Order of Merit in 1925 and made a Baron in 1931, choosing for his coat of arms a design that included a kiwi and a Māori warrior. Many scientific institutions, streets and school houses bear his name and his image appears on the $100 note and on a stamp issued by New Zealand Post in 2008. He is the only New Zealander to have an element – rutherfordium – named in his honour. (The mineral rutherfordine is also named after him).

 

Rutherford died in 1937 of complications from a hernia. Years before, in the midst of the First World War, he had expressed the hope that no one would discover how to extract the energy of the atom until man was ‘living at peace with his neighbours’. Nuclear fission, which made possible the use of nuclear power, was discovered two years after his death.

 

By Emma Brewerton

 

Ernest Rutherford (1871 - 1937)

 

 

Ernest Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871, in Spring Grove (now in Brightwater), New Zealand, near Nelson. He was the second son in a family of seven sons and five daughters. He studied at Nelson Collegiate School, and in 1889 won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand. He graduated M.A. in 1893 with a double major in Mathematics and Physical Science, and he continued with research work at the College for a short time, receiving his Bachelor of Science degree the following year.

 

 

That same year, he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship, enabling him to go to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory under J.J. Thomson. There, he briefly held the world record for the distance over which wireless waves were detected. During the investigation of radioactivity, he coined the terms alpha, beta and gamma rays. In 1897, Rutherford was awarded his B.A. Research Degree and the Coutts-Trotter Studentship of Trinity College.

 

 

When the McDonald Chair of Physics at McGill University in Montreal became vacant in 1898, Rutherford left for Canada to take up the post. There, he did the work that gained him the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, demonstrating that radioactivity was the spontaneous disintegration of atoms. This is ironic given his famous remark, "In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting." He noticed that in a sample of radioactive material, it invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay - its "half-life" - and created a practical application for this phenomenon using this constant rate of decay as a clock, which could then be used to help determine the actual age of the Earth that turned out to be much older than most scientists at the time believed.

 

 

In 1907, Rutherford took the chair of physics at the University of Manchester. There, he discovered the nuclear nature of atoms and was the world's first successful "alchemist": he converted nitrogen into oxygen. In 1919, he succeeded Sir Joseph Thomson as Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. He also 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.

 

 

Under Rutherford's directorship, Nobel Prizes were awarded to James Chadwick for discovering the neutron, Cockcroft and Walton for splitting the atom using a particle accelerator and Appleton for demonstrating the existence of the ionosphere. His research was instrumental in the convening of the Manhattan Project.

 

 

By 1911, after studying the deflection of alpha particles shot through gold foil, he had established the nuclear theory of the atom. In June of 1919, Rutherford announced his success in artificially disintegrating nitrogen into hydrogen and oxygen by alpha particle bombardment. Rutherford then spent several years directing the development of proton accelerators (atom smashers).

 

 

Knighted in 1914, Rutherford was raised to the peerage as the first Baron Rutherford of Nelson in 1931-a barony that ceased to exist after his death. He died at Cambridge on October 19, 1937, and was buried at Westminster Abbey, in London.