By: Samuel Barker

 Ernest was born on August 30 th 1871 in Spring Grove, New Zealand.  He died on October 19 th 1937 at the age of 66 in Cambridge, New England from a Strangulated Hernia.  His father was a flax-miller and could not support the family off his meagre wages.  So his mother became a school teacher and she inspired all of her children to stay in school with a philosophy of ‘knowledge is power’. 

 In 1896, Ernest started his career with JJ Thomson’s ongoing investigation of the conduction of electricity through gases but later took up the field of radioactivity which was just opened by Henri Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie.  Rutherford spent most of his life researching and studying radioactivity.  in-history/themes/atomic-and-nuclear-structure/rutherford.aspx in-history/themes/atomic-and-nuclear-structure/rutherford.aspx

 In 1898, after he started to follow the field of radioactivity he coined the terms “Alpha” and “Beta” to describe the two different types of radiation emitted from Uranium.  Referring to Radiation, it took the same amount of time for half of it to decay or more commonly known as “half-life”.  herford.html herford.html

 Transferring to Manchester University in He and an assistant, Hans Geiger, developed the electrical method of tirelessly detecting single particles emitted by radioactive atoms, the Rutherford-Geiger detector.  With this he could determine important physical constants such as Avogadro's number, the number of atoms or molecules in one gramme-mole of material.  In 1911, Rutherford deduced from these results that almost all of the mass of an atom is concentrated in a nucleus a thousand times smaller than the atom itself. The nuclear model of the atom had been born. 

 In 1898, J.J. Thomson studied the charge-to-mass ratio of the most common ion, which later was called the electron, while Rutherford pursued other radiations that produced ions.  Rutherford first looked at ultraviolet radiation and then at radiation emitted by uranium. (Uranium radiation was first detected in 1896 by the French physicist Henri Becquerel.)  Placement of uranium near thin foils revealed to Rutherford that the radiation was more complex than previously thought: one type was easily absorbed or blocked by a very thin foil, but another type often penetrated the same thin foils. He named these radiation types alpha and beta for simplicity.  For the next several years these radiations were of primary interest; later the radioactive elements, which were emitting radiation, enjoyed most of the scientific attention.  Rutherford-of-Nelson Rutherford-of-Nelson