2. Michael Faraday was born in South London to a humble family.

The only basic formal

education he received was in reading, writing and arithmetic as a child. He left school when he
was thirteen and started working in a bookbinding shop. His passion for science was awakened
by the description of electricity he read in a copy of the Encyclopædia Britannica he was
binding, after which he started experimenting in an improvised laboratory. Faraday was hired in
1813 as Humphry Davy’s laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution in London, where he was
elected a member in 1824 and where he worked until his death in 1867, first as Davy’s
assistant, then as his collaborator, and finally, after Davy’s death, as his successor. Faraday
made such an impression on Davy that when the latter was asked about his greatest discovery,
Davy answered: “My greatest discovery was Michael Faraday”.
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6. With the German physicist Hans Geiger, Rutherford developed an electrical counter for ionized
particles; when perfected by Geiger, the Geiger counter became the universal tool for measuring
radioactivity. Thanks to the skill of the laboratory’s glassblower, Rutherford and his student
Thomas Royds were able to isolate some alpha particles and perform a spectrochemical analysis,
proving that the particles were helium ions. Boltwood then visited Rutherford’s laboratory, and
together they redetermined the rate of production of helium by radium, from which they calculated
a precise value of Avogadro’s number. Continuing his long-standing interest in the alpha particle,
Rutherford studied its slight scattering when it hit a foil. Geiger joined him, and they obtained ever
more quantitative data. In 1909 when an undergraduate, Ernest Marsden, needed a research
project, Rutherford suggested that he look for large-angle scattering. Marsden found that a small
number of alphas were turned more than 90 degrees from their original direction, leading
Rutherford to exclaim (with embellishment over the years), “It was almost as incredible as if you
fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”

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