Ernest Rutherford Biography
Ernest Rutherford was born 30 August 1871 in Brightwater, New Zealand. He was a son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson. Originally he from Hornchurch, Essex, England.
He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College. He participated in the debating society and played rugby.
After gaining BSc, and doing two years of research during which he invented a new form of radio receiver.
In 1895, Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 awarded a Research Fellowship to Rutherford. He travel to England for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
He was among the first of the ‘aliens’ (those without a Cambridge degree) allowed to do research at the university, under the inspiring leadership of J. J. Thomson. In 1898, Thomson recommended Rutherford for a position at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Ernest Rutherford Discovery
At Cambridge, Rutherford started to work with J. J. Thomson on the conductive effects of X-rays on gases, work which led to the discovery of the electron which Thomson presented to the world in 1897.
He coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray in 1899 to describe the two distinct types of radiation. Rutherford then discovered that thorium gave off a gas which produced an emanation which was itself radioactive and would coat other substances.
Later he found that a sample of this radioactive material of any size invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay – its “half-life” (11½ minutes in this case). In 1903, they published their “Law of Radioactive Change,” to account for all their experiments.
Rutherford performed his most famous work after receiving the Nobel prize in 1908.
Along with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909, he carried out the Geiger–Marsden experiment. He demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms by deflecting alpha particles passing through a thin gold foil.
Soon Rutherford’s research, and work done under him as laboratory director, established the nuclear structure of the atom and the essential nature of radioactive decay as a nuclear process.
Ernest Rutherford Atomic Theory
In early work, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive half-life. He also discovered the radioactive element radon, and differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation.
Later it is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances”. He was the first Canadian and Oceanian Nobel laureate.
Ernest Rutherford Experiment
Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate.
In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus.
He thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering by the gold foil experiment of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden.
Later he conducted research that led to the first “splitting” of the atom in 1917. Nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton.
Ernest Rutherford Atomic Model
Rutherford performed his most famous work after receiving the Nobel prize in 1908. Along with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909, he carried out the Geiger–Marsden experiment. Later he demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms by deflecting alpha particles passing through a thin gold foil.
Soon Rutherford looked for alpha particles with very high deflection angles, of a type not expected from any theory of matter at that time.
Such deflections, though rare, proved to be a smooth but high-order function of the deflection angle.
Later it was Rutherford’s interpretation of this data that led him to formulate the Rutherford model of the atom in 1911 – that a very small charged nucleus, containing much of the atom’s mass, was orbited by low-mass electrons.