We all learned, at least at a basic level, about atoms, radioactivity, atomic numbers of elements, and the like. For all of it we can thank Ernest Rutherford, who was born August 30, 1871 in New Zealand. At the time he was born, New Zealand was still a colony, not an independent country.
In 1887, Rutherford achieved the highest score on an academic test of anyone in his town, and was awarded a scholarship to Nelson College. While there he won another scholarship this one to the University of New Zealand, where he earned BA, MA, and PhD degrees — all within four years. Just after he finished school, he invented a new kind of radio receiver, and was awarded a fellowship enabling him to travel to England to join the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
Rutherford was one of the first offered a slot at Cavendish from outside Cambridge itself. His first work was on radio waves, but when he demonstrated his initial feat — detecting radio waves over a distance of 800 meters, he discovered that Guglielmo Marconi had done the same thing across 16 kilometers at nearly the same time.
Rutherford turned his attention to X-rays, and his work led to the discovery of the electron in 1897. He moved to McGill University in Canada in 1898, where he studied radioactivity. He discovered the process, and coined the term, “half-life,” which is a measurement of the time it takes a radioactive substance to decay. Thanks to his work, scientists became aware for the first time that atoms could spontaneously disintegrate — but into what, they didn’t know. Rutherford also discovered, and named, alpha, beta, and gamma rays, and theorized that the sun was powered by radioactive energy. The term “nuclear energy” didn’t yet exist, because the idea that an atom had a nucleus hadn’t been thought of. But it soon was, by Rutherford. The current understanding of things like atoms and quantum mechanics is based on the model Rutherford developed with Niels Bohr (Rutherford contributed the nucleus part of the idea, and Bohr theorized electrons).
In 1908 Rutherford won the Nobel Prize for physics, but didn’t slow down in his research. During World War I, while working on ways to detect submarines, he invented a device that led to ultrasonic technology. There’s a story that he also invented sonar, but that’s one thing he actually didn’t do. When he returned to the Cavendish Laboratory in 1919, he became the director, and researchers under his direction won three more Nobel Prizes. In 1920 he helped discover, and named, the proton. He followed that up the very next year by theorizing the neutron. When the neutron’s existence was finally proved by James Chadwick in 1932, Chadwick also won Nobel. His student Patrick Blackett won yet another Nobel, in 1948, for work initiated by Rutherford years earlier.
Rutherford was knighted in 1914, and became the first Baron Rutherford of Nelson in 1931. He died unexpectedly, during an operation, in 1937, which meant that in addition to being the first, he was also the last Baron Rutherford of Nelson. He’s considered to be one of the greatest scientists in history, and has been compared to Isaac Newton. Appropriately, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, near Newton and Darwin. If you ever find yourself in a nuclear physics lab at just the right time, you might see (though a lot of radiation shielding) some rutherfordium. Its atomic number is 104, and its half-life is only 48 minutes.
