ERNEST RUTHERFORD

Chemist and physicist Ernest Rutherford

was born August 30, 1871, in Spring
Grove, New Zealand. A pioneer of nuclear
physics and the first to split the atom,
Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel
Prize in Chemistry for his theory of
atomic structure. Dubbed the “Father of
the Nuclear Age,” Rutherford died in
Cambridge, England, on October 19, 1937
of a strangulated hernia
Ernest Rutherford was born in rural Spring
Grove, on the South Island of New Zealand
on August 30, 1871. He was the fourth of
12 children, and the second son. His
father, James, had little education and
struggled to support the large family on a
flax-miller’s income. Ernest’s mother,
Martha, worked as a schoolteacher. She
believed that knowledge was power, and
placed a strong emphasis on her
children’s education.
As a child, Ernest, whose family called him
“Ern,” spent most of his time after school
milking cows and helping with other
chores on the family farm. Weekends were
spent swimming in the creek with his
brothers. Since money was tight,
Rutherford found inventive ways of
overcoming his family’s financial
challenges, including birds-nesting to earn
funds for his kite-flying supplies. “We
haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think,”
was Rutherford’s motto at the time.
At the age of 10, Rutherford was handed his
first science book, at Foxhill School. It was a
pivotal moment for Rutherford, given that
the book inspired his very first scientific
experiment. The young Rutherford
constructed a miniature cannon, which, to
his family’s surprise, promptly and
unexpectedly exploded. Despite the
outcome, Rutherford’s interest in
academics remained unfaltering. In 1887 he
was awarded a scholarship to attend Nelson
Collegiate School, a private secondary
school where he would board and play
rugby until 1889.
In 1890 Rutherford landed another
scholarship—this time to Canterbury
College in Christchurch, New Zealand.
At Canterbury College, Rutherford’s
professors fueled his enthusiasm for
seeking concrete proof through
scientific experimentation. Rutherford
obtained both his Bachelor of Arts and
his Master of Arts degrees there, and
managed to achieve first-class honors in
math and science.
In 1894, still at Canterbury, Rutherford
conducted independent research on the
ability of high-frequency electrical
discharge to magnetize iron. His
research earned him a Bachelor of
Science degree in just one year’s time.
During that same year, Rutherford met
and fell in love with his landlady’s
daughter, Mary Newton. The couple
married in 1900 and later welcomed a
daughter, whom they named Eileen.
The Rutherford model was devised by Ernest
Rutherford to describe an atom. Rutherford
directed the famous Geiger–Marsden experiment in
1909 which suggested, upon Rutherford's 1911
analysis, that J. J. Thomson's plum pudding model
of the atom was incorrect. Rutherford's new
model[1] for the atom, based on the experimental
results, contained new features of a relatively high
central charge concentrated into a very small
volume in comparison to the rest of the atom and
with this central volume also containing the bulk of
the atomic mass of the atom. This region would be
known as the "nucleus" of the atom.
Rutherford overturned Thomson's model
in 1911 with his well-known gold foil
experiment in which he demonstrated that
the atom has a tiny and heavy nucleus.
Rutherford designed an experiment to use
the alpha particles emitted by a
radioactive element as probes to the
unseen world of atomic structure. If
Thomson was correct, the beam would go
straight through the gold foil. Most of the
beams went through the foil, but a few
were deflected
Rutherford presented his own physical model for
subatomic structure, as an interpretation for the
unexpected experimental results. In it, the atom is
made up of a central charge (this is the modern
atomic nucleus, though Rutherford did not use the
term "nucleus" in his paper) surrounded by a cloud
of (presumably) orbiting electrons. In this May
1911 paper, Rutherford only committed himself to
a small central region of very high positive or
negative charge in the atom.
Gold foil experiment

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, which demonstrated the
nuclear nature of atoms by deflecting alpha particles
passing through a thin gold foil. Rutherford was
inspired to ask Geiger and Marsden in this experiment
to look 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,
were found, and proved to be a smooth but high-order
function of the deflection angle.
 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[9] nucleus, containing much of the
atom's mass, was orbited by low-mass
electrons. In 1919–1920, Rutherford found
that nitrogen and other light elements ejected
a proton (Rutherford said "a hydrogen atom"
rather than "a proton") when hit with α (alpha)
particles.[33] This result showed Rutherford
that hydrogen nuclei were a part of nitrogen
nuclei (and by inference, probably other nuclei
as well). Such a construction had been
suspected for many years on the basis of
atomic weights which were whole numbers of
that of hydrogen; see Prout's hypothesis.
Hydrogen was known to be the lightest element,
and its nuclei presumably the lightest nuclei. Now,
because of all these considerations, Rutherford
decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a
fundamental building block of all nuclei, and also
possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since
nothing was known from the nucleus that was
lighter. Thus, confirming and extending the work of
Wilhelm Wien who in 1898 discovered the proton in
streams of ionized gas,[34] Rutherford postulated
the hydrogen nucleus to be a new particle in 1920,
which he dubbed the proton.
Rutherford's theory of neutrons was
proved in 1932 by his associate James
Chadwick, who recognized neutrons
immediately when they were produced by
other scientists and later himself, in
bombarding beryllium with alpha
particles. In 1935, Chadwick was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Physics for this
discovery.
How did Rutherford make gold foil?

Ernest Rutherford hypothesized that an

atom's mass was uniformly spread out
in its shape. In the Gold Foil Experiment
he shot alpha particles at a thin sheet
of gold; he thought the particles would
travel right through the sheet, rather
like a bullet traveling through a sand
bag.